Name: Chocolate Sweetmeats
Ingredients: 2 ounces chocolate; ½ cup warm water; 1 pound marzipan paste; vanilla or cinnamon (optional)

Why it works: Chocolate and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,020 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Chocolate Sweetmeats

Ingredients

2 ounces chocolate
½ cup warm water
1 pound marzipan paste
vanilla or cinnamon (optional)

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the mixture

Break the chocolate into warm water.
Heat until completely dissolved.
Mix with marzipan paste and add vanilla or cinnamon if desired.

Shape and bake

Spread the mixture on wafer paper in desired shapes.
Bake in a moderate oven (350°F / 175°C) until set.
If the sweetmeats are not dark enough, add a little food coloring.

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.

Chocolate + vanillatop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,020 recipes

Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

What each ingredient does

Chocolate: Provides the dark color and rich chocolate flavor of the sweetmeats.
Marzipan paste: Supplies the sweetness and body that hold the mixture together in shapes.

“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.