Skip to main content
Drink

Nourishing Drinks

A hot cocoa drink made by boiling cocoa mixture with water, then adding milk or cream and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cocoa and milk work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 643 recipes. Both carry methyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Nourishing Drinks

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine ½ cup of cocoa mixture with 1 quart of cold water in a pot.

  2. Boil the mixture gently for about 6 hours, adding more water as needed to replace what evaporates.

  3. Once done, serve by adding milk or cream and sugar to taste.

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. Cocoa + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together643 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

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

  3. Cocoa + sugartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together956 recipes

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

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

Cocoa mixture
Provides the chocolate flavour and colour that the drink is built on.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture gently for about 6 hours. Long gentle simmering extracts flavour from the cocoa slowly, while a rolling boil can scorch the solids. Adding water as it evaporates keeps the drink from over-concentrating and sticking to the pot.

Swap the cocoa

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

  1. Cocoathe original
  2. Almondfits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Peanutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, 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.

You might also like

CocoaCocoa42 recipesCocoa Nut MilkCocoa Nut Milk10 recipesVegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipes