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Drink

Cocoa

A hot cocoa beverage made by mixing cocoa, sugar, boiling water, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Cocoa

Why it works: Cocoa and milk work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 643 recipes. Both carry methyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Cocoa

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cocoa

  1. Combine cocoa and sugar in a breakfast cup.

  2. Pour a little boiling water into the cup.

  3. Mix until a smooth paste forms.

  4. Fill the cup with more boiling water.

  5. Add Ideal milk to the cup.

  6. Stir the mixture.

Add the milk and reheat

  1. Mix Ideal milk with cold water.

  2. Boil the mixture.

  3. Add the boiled mixture to the cocoa.

  4. Return the mixture to the saucepan.

  5. Boil again.

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.

  1. Cocoa + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together643 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  2. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Cocoa + sugartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together956 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Cocoa
Provides the chocolate flavour and dark colour of the drink.
Sugar
Sweetens the drink and balances the bitterness of the cocoa.
Ideal milk
Adds richness and creaminess to the drink.

The step that matters

Make a smooth paste first. Cocoa powder clumps when it meets a large amount of liquid at once. Mixing it with a little boiling water into a paste lets the particles disperse before more water is added.

Swap the cocoa

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

  1. Cocoathe original
  2. Almondfits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Peanutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk. 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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