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Dessert

Chocolate Pie

A chocolate pie with a meringue topping baked in a pre-baked crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the crust

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Prick the pie crust well with a fork on both sides and the bottom.

  3. Bake the crust until lightly golden.

Make the filling

  1. In a saucepan, combine milk or water, egg yolks, cornstarch, grated chocolate, and sugar.

  2. Boil the mixture until thick, then pour it into the baked crust.

Top and bake

  1. Whip the egg whites to make meringue and spread it over the filling.

  2. Bake the pie until the meringue is browned.

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. Milk + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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 filling and add richness to the custard.
Cornstarch
Thickens the milk mixture as it boils, giving the filling body.
Egg whites
Whipped into foam to form the airy meringue topping.
Grated chocolate
Provides the chocolate flavour and dark colour of the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps stabilise the whipped meringue.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the filling that thickens when boiled.

The step that matters

Boil the filling until thick. Cornstarch only thickens fully when the mixture reaches a boil and is kept there briefly. Undercooked filling stays runny and will soak the crust and weep under the meringue.

“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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