Skip to main content
Dessert

Hot Chocolate Sauce to Serve with Ice Cream

A hot chocolate sauce made with water, sugar, chocolate, arrowroot, milk, and vanilla, served over ice cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Hot Chocolate Sauce to Serve with Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil 1 cup of water and ½ cup of sugar for 5 minutes.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix 6 tablespoons of Baker’s chocolate, 1 tablespoon of arrowroot, and ⅓ cup of sweet milk.

  3. Add the chocolate mixture to the boiling water and sugar, and boil for 3 minutes.

  4. Strain the sauce and stir in 1 teaspoon of vanilla.

Serve

  1. Serve hot over ice cream.

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. Sugar + chocolatetop 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

Baker’s chocolate
Provides the chocolate flavour and body of the sauce.
Arrowroot
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it a smooth, glossy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps give it a syrupy body.

The step that matters

Adding the arrowroot mixture to the boiling liquid. Arrowroot thickens when heated but can clump if added to liquid unevenly. Stirring the mixture in well and keeping the sauce boiling while it is added helps it disperse and thicken smoothly.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, chocolate, milk, 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 sugar, chocolate, milk, 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.

You might also like

Chocolate CreamChocolate Cream171 recipesVanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesChocolate CookiesChocolate Cookies76 recipesChocolate FudgeChocolate Fudge55 recipes