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Dessert

Fresh Fruit Sugared

A dish of red and white currants and cherries coated in beaten egg white and powdered sugar, then dried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and white currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Fresh Fruit Sugared

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Select full, beautiful stems of red and white currants and fine bunches of cherries.

  2. Beat the egg white just enough to break it.

Coat and dry

  1. Dip the fruit in the egg white, then coat it in powdered sugar.

  2. Leave the fruit to dry on the shallow side of a sieve.

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. Red currant + white curranttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

  4. Red currant + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. White currant + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Egg white
Thin liquid film that the powdered sugar clings to, binding the coating to the fruit.
Powdered sugar
Forms a thin, dry sweet coating on the fruit surface as the egg white dries.
Cherries
Main fruit that receives the sugar coating and becomes sweet and crisp-surfaced.

The step that matters

Beat the egg white just enough to break it. Egg white is mostly water and protein. Light beating loosens it into an even liquid that coats the fruit thinly. Over-beating traps air and forms a foam, which leaves the sugar clumped and uneven.

Swap the white currant

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

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Currantfits better
  4. White currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against red currant, egg, sugar. 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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