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Dessert

Chocolate Cream, in Paste

A chocolate cream filling made with chocolate, milk, sugar, lemon peel, egg yolks, and poured onto puff pastry.

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 Cream, in Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Make the chocolate cream

  1. Shave the required quantity of chocolate.

  2. Boil chocolate gently in milk and sugar with a little lemon peel.

  3. Remove the lemon peel when mixed and nearly cold.

  4. Add egg yolks and stir constantly over heat to prevent curdling, but do not boil.

Assemble

  1. Pour the uniform mixture onto a crust of puff pastry.

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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the cream as they set gently with heat, giving it a smooth, rich body.
Chocolate
Provides the main flavour and, as it melts into the milk, colours and firms the cream.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that carries the chocolate and sugar and gives the cream its softness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the bitterness of the chocolate.
Puff pastry
Forms the crisp base that holds the cream.

The step that matters

Add egg yolks and stir constantly over heat. Egg yolk proteins thicken the cream when gently heated, but if the mixture gets too hot or is left unstirred, the proteins scramble and curdle. Keeping it below boiling and stirring constantly keeps the cream smooth.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chocolate, milk, sugar, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chocolate, milk, sugar, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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