Name: Concentrated Cocoa Syrup
Ingredients: 1 lb cocoa; ½ gallon boiling water; ½ cup sugar

Why it works: Cocoa and sugar work together. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 956 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Concentrated Cocoa Syrup

Ingredients

1 lb cocoa
½ gallon boiling water
½ cup sugar

Directions

Boil the cocoa and boiling water together for 10 minutes.
Stir in the sugar until dissolved.

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.

Cocoa + sugartop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together956 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cocoa: Provides the main chocolate flavour and deep colour of the syrup.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and body, and helps keep the syrup smooth and pourable.

“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.