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Dessert

Marshmallow Icing

A sweet icing made with powdered gum arabic, sugar syrup, and beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Marshmallow Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gum arabic

  1. Soak the gum arabic in warm water for 1 hour.

  2. Heat the mixture over hot water and stir until dissolved.

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar and ½ cup water until it reaches a thread stage.

Whip the icing

  1. While hot, pour the syrup over the beaten egg whites, beating constantly.

  2. Add the dissolved gum arabic and continue beating until cold.

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
Provides sweetness and, when boiled, the syrup that sets the icing's structure.
Egg whites
Whipped with hot syrup to form the airy, foamy body of the icing.
Powdered white gum arabic
Stabilizes the foam and helps the icing stay smooth and hold its shape.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot syrup over the egg whites. The syrup must be hot and poured in a thin stream while beating constantly; this cooks the egg white proteins gently and builds a stable, glossy foam instead of a runny or grainy mixture.

“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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