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Dessert

Hot Chocolate Sauce for Ice Cream

A hot chocolate sauce made from cream, vanilla, chocolate, sugar, and whipped cream, served hot over ice cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Vanilla and chocolate are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,020 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Hot Chocolate Sauce for Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a kettle, combine the cream and half of the vanilla bean.

  2. Bring to a boil.

  3. Add the broken chocolate and sugar, stirring until dissolved.

  4. Strain the mixture through a fine strainer.

Serve

  1. Just before serving, stir in the whipped cream and serve very 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. Vanilla + chocolatetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,020 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  2. Vanilla + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Cream + chocolatetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,466 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Vanilla and sugar 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

Cream
Provides the liquid base and richness that gives the sauce its smooth, pourable body.
Chocolate
Supplies the main flavor and, as it melts into the hot cream, thickens the sauce.
Vanilla bean
Adds aromatic vanilla flavor infused into the hot cream.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the bitterness of the chocolate.

The step that matters

Add the chocolate and stir until dissolved. Chocolate must melt fully into the hot cream; if it is added to cream that is not hot enough or not stirred, it can stay grainy or seize into lumps rather than forming a smooth sauce.

“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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