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Dessert

Chocolate Creams

Chocolate cream balls made from arrowroot, sugar, water, vanilla, and coated in melted chocolate.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Chocolate Creams

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Mix the arrowroot with the water until smooth.

  2. Pour into a lined saucepan, add the sugar, and boil for about 10 minutes, stirring constantly.

  3. Remove from heat and stir until it begins to cool.

Shape and coat

  1. Flavor with vanilla essence and roll into small balls.

  2. Melt the chocolate, roll each ball in it, and place on a buttered surface to cool.

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. 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 + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Arrowroot + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

Arrowroot
Thickens the syrup into a firm, smooth mass that holds its shape when cooled.
White sugar
Sweetens the mixture and, boiled with water, forms the syrup that sets the creams.
Chocolate
Forms a melted outer coating that adds flavor and a firm, glossy shell.

The step that matters

Stirring while boiling. Constant stirring keeps the arrowroot and sugar mixture from scorching on the pan bottom and helps it cook evenly into a smooth, uniformly thick base.

“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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