Name: Chocolate
Ingredients: 4 tablespoons chocolate; 1 quart boiling water; ½ pint milk

Why it works: Chocolate and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,128 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Chocolate

Ingredients

4 tablespoons chocolate
1 quart boiling water
½ pint milk

Directions

Scrape up 4 tablespoons of chocolate into a pot.
Add 1 quart of boiling water and boil until dissolved.
Stir in ½ pint of milk and bring to a boil.
Let each person sweeten their own cup.

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.

Chocolate + milktop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,128 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Chocolate: Provides the main flavor and body of the drink as it melts into the liquid.
Milk: Adds creaminess and softens the bitterness of the chocolate.

“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.