Name: Chocolate
Ingredients: roasted cacao seeds; sago flour or potato starch; honey; vanilla or cinnamon (optional)

Why it works: Honey and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,262 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Chocolate

Ingredients

roasted cacao seeds
sago flour or potato starch
honey
vanilla or cinnamon (optional)

Directions

Prepare the paste

Remove the husks from the roasted cacao seeds.
Grind the seeds in a mill on a heated iron plate until they form a brown pasty mass.

Flavor and set

Sweeten the paste with honey and add sago flour or potato starch for thickness.
Flavor with vanilla or cinnamon if desired.
Pour the mixture into molds and let it set.

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.

Honey + vanillatop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,262 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Flour + vanillatop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together19,241 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + honeytop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,637 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Roasted cacao seeds: Provide the chocolate flavor and the base mass of the paste.
Sago flour or potato starch: Thickens the paste so it holds its shape when set.
Honey: Adds sweetness to balance the bitter cacao.