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Dessert

Hot Chocolate Sauce

A hot chocolate sauce made by cooking sugar, water, cocoa, and boiling water, served over vanilla ice cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Hot Chocolate Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a small saucepan, combine the sugar and hot water, then cook until a drop forms a soft ball in cold water.

  2. In an enamel cup, mix the cocoa powder and boiling water over gentle heat to form a smooth paste.

  3. Add the cocoa mixture to the syrup and cook again until it reaches the soft ball stage.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately over very stiff vanilla ice cream.

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. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Cocoa powder + vanillatop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  4. Cocoa powder + creamtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together826 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Sugar + cocoa powdertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Granulated sugar
Provides sweetness and, when cooked, forms the syrup that sets the sauce's thickness.
Cocoa powder
Supplies the chocolate flavour and dark colour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the syrup to the soft ball stage after adding the cocoa. The sugar concentration determines how thick the sauce becomes as it cools. Stopping too early leaves a thin sauce that runs off the ice cream, while cooking too far makes it stiff and grainy.

“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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