The mathematical physicists Bershadsky–Cecotti–Ooguri–Vafa (BCOV) proposed, in a seminal article from 1994, a conjecture extending genus zero mirror symmetry to higher genera. With a view towards a refined formulation of the Grothendieck–Riemann–Roch theorem, we offer a mathematical description of the BCOV conjecture at genus one. As an application of the arithmetic Riemann–Roch theorem of Gillet–Soulé and our previous results on the BCOV invariant, we establish this conjecture for Calabi–Yau hypersurfaces in projective spaces. Our contribution takes place on the B-side, and together with the work of Zinger on the A-side, it provides the first complete examples of the mirror symmetry program in higher dimensions. The case of quintic threefolds was studied by Fang–Lu–Yoshikawa. Our approach also lends itself to arithmetic considerations of the BCOV invariant, and we study a Chowla–Selberg type theorem expressing it in terms of special
$\Gamma $
-values for certain Calabi–Yau manifolds with complex multiplication.