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Drink

Plain Chocolate

A simple chocolate milk made by melting chocolate with sugar, water, and milk, optionally thickened with arrowroot or corn starch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 242 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Plain Chocolate

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chocolate

  1. Heat the milk in a double boiler.

  2. Scrape the chocolate finely and place it in a small frying pan with the sugar and water.

  3. Set the frying pan over medium heat and stir constantly until smooth and glossy.

Make the chocolate milk

  1. Stir the chocolate mixture into the boiling milk.

  2. For a thicker chocolate, mix the arrowroot or corn-starch with 2 tablespoons of cold milk, stir into the boiling milk, and cook for 10 minutes before adding the dissolved chocolate.

  3. Add vanilla if desired.

  4. Beat with a whisk for three minutes and serve hot.

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. Arrowroot + vanillatop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together242 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

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

  5. Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Chocolate
Provides the main chocolate flavour and colour of the drink.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and gives the drink its creamy body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the bitterness of the chocolate.
Arrowroot or corn-starch
Thickens the milk when cooked, giving a heavier body to the drink.

The step that matters

Dissolving the chocolate smoothly. Chocolate must be melted slowly with sugar and water and stirred constantly, because overheating or skipping the stirring can make it grainy or scorched rather than smooth and glossy.

Swap the arrowroot

The recipe marks arrowroot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chocolate, milk, sugar, vanilla):

  1. Arrowrootthe original
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits less well
  4. Potatofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against chocolate, milk, sugar, vanilla. 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.

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