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Dessert

Cocoa-nut Doce

A sweet syrup made from sugar, water, grated cocoa-nut, and flavored with orange-flower water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cocoa and orange work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cocoa-nut Doce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar and water in a saucepan and stir until the sugar dissolves.

Cook and flavor

  1. Add grated cocoa-nut to the syrup and cook until tender.

  2. Flavor with a few drops of orange-flower water before serving.

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. Cocoa + orangetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together53 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + cocoatop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together956 recipes

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

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Sugar
Dissolves into the water to form the syrup that sweetens and sets the coconut.
Fine fresh grated cocoa-nut
Forms the body of the sweet, cooked in syrup until tender.
Orange-flower water
Adds a floral aroma that complements the coconut.

Swap the cocoa

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, orange):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Cocoathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, orange. 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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