Name: To Make Cocoa
Ingredients: 1 teaspoon Van Houten’s cocoa per cup; boiling water; sugar to taste

Why it works: Cocoa and sugar work together. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 956 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

To Make Cocoa

Ingredients

1 teaspoon Van Houten’s cocoa per cup
boiling water
sugar to taste

Directions

Place 1 teaspoon of Van Houten’s cocoa in a cup.
Pour boiling water over the cocoa and stir.
Add sugar to taste.
For larger quantities, use 1 teaspoon of cocoa per cup in a warmed jug, pour boiling water, stir, and serve.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Cocoa + sugartop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together956 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cocoa: Provides the chocolate flavor and deep color of the drink.
Boiling water: Dissolves and carries the cocoa, extracting its flavor into a hot drink.
Sugar: Adds sweetness to balance the bitterness of the cocoa.

“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.