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Dessert

Chocolate Pie

A chocolate pie made with grated chocolate, sugar, flour, milk, eggs, and baked with a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Chocolate and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,404 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Chocolate Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Mix the grated chocolate, sugar, flour, and a little sweet milk together.

  2. Stir this mixture into the boiling milk until thick.

  3. Add the beaten yolks of the eggs.

Assemble and brown

  1. Bake the pie crust first.

  2. Fill the crust with the chocolate mixture.

  3. Top with the beaten egg whites.

  4. Brown in the oven.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Chocolate + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Grated chocolate
Provides the main chocolate flavour and body of the filling.
Flour
Thickens the mixture as its starch cooks in the boiling milk.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and set the filling, while whites form the light topping that browns.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour and egg yolks thicken into a custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the bitterness of the chocolate.

The step that matters

Add the beaten yolks of the eggs.. The filling must be thick but not too hot when the yolks go in, because very hot liquid can scramble the eggs. Stirring steadily keeps the custard smooth and evenly set.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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