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Dessert

Chocolate Syrup

Chocolate syrup made by boiling chocolate with water, sugar, vanilla, and ice, then served over milk and topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Vanilla and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Chocolate Syrup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Mix the scraped chocolate with boiling water in a pot.

  2. Let the mixture boil, then add the sugar and boil for three minutes.

  3. When cold, stir in the vanilla.

Assemble the drink

  1. In a glass, combine the chocolate syrup and cracked ice, then fill with milk.

  2. Top with whipped cream and stir well.

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. Vanilla + milktop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Chocolate + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,020 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Chocolate + creamtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Scraped chocolate
Provides the chocolate flavor that gives the syrup its character.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and, when boiled, thickens it into a syrup.
Milk
Dilutes the chilled syrup and adds creaminess to the drink.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar syrup. Boiling the sugar with the chocolate for the full three minutes helps dissolve the sugar fully and concentrate the syrup. Stopping early can leave it thin, while overboiling can make it too thick once cooled.

“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.

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