Skip to main content
Dessert

To Clarify Sugar for Sweetmeats

A clarified sugar syrup made by boiling sugar and water with egg white, skimming impurities.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Clarify Sugar for Sweetmeats

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar and cold water in a preserving kettle to cover the fruit.

  2. Beat egg whites until frothy and mix with the sugared water.

  3. Heat mixture over a slow fire, stirring well.

  4. Once it boils, remove from heat and let it sit for a minute.

  5. Skim off the scum, return to heat, and boil for another minute.

  6. Repeat skimming until the syrup is clear.

Cool

  1. Allow the syrup to cool before adding fruit.

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 + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Dissolves in the water to form the syrup and provides sweetness.
Egg white
Coagulates when heated, trapping impurities so they can be skimmed off, clearing the syrup.

The step that matters

Skimming until the syrup is clear. Scum must be removed as the mixture heats. If it is left in, the syrup stays cloudy. Egg white proteins coagulate and collect impurities, so skimming after each boil removes them.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes