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Dessert

Chocolate Mould

A chocolate dessert thickened from milk, potato and wheat flour, sweetened and flavored with cocoa and vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Chocolate Mould

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Smooth the potato flour, whole wheat flour, and cocoa powder with some of the milk.

  2. Add sugar to the remaining milk.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  4. Thicken it with the smoothed ingredients.

  5. Let the mixture simmer for 10 minutes, stirring frequently.

  6. Add the vanilla extract and mix well.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a wetted mold.

  2. Let it cool.

  3. Turn it out and serve plain or with cold white sauce.

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. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Milk + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Potato + wheattop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together235 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  4. Vanilla + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Milk + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

Vanilla and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Potato flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, rich custard-like body.
Whole wheat flour
Adds further thickening and body to the mixture.
Cocoa powder
Provides the chocolate flavor and darkens the mousse.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flours thicken and sets as it cools.

The step that matters

Smoothing the flours with milk before thickening. Starch lumps form if flour is added directly to boiling liquid. Mixing it into a cool portion of milk first lets the starch disperse evenly, so it thickens smoothly when stirred into the hot mixture.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, flour, wheat, cocoa powder, vanilla, sugar):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, wheat, cocoa powder, vanilla, sugar. 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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