Name: Chocolate Drops
Ingredients: 4 ounces best French chocolate; ½ pound sifted sugar; pin-head comfits (optional)

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 Drops

Oven, in the book's wordsA steady oven

Ingredients

4 ounces best French chocolate
½ pound sifted sugar
pin-head comfits (optional)

Directions

Make the drops

Dissolve the chocolate in a little boiling water.
Stir in the sifted sugar until the mixture is smooth and hot.
Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto sheets of writing paper, about the size of a sixpence.

Finish and store

Let the drops cool completely.
If desired, shake the soft drops in a paper with pin-head comfits.
Store the drops in layers between sheets of paper.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + sugartop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together15,404 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Best french chocolate: Forms the body of the drops and sets firm as it cools.
Sifted sugar: Sweetens the drops and thickens the mixture as it dissolves and cools.

“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.