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Dessert

Fig and Nut Icing

A brittle icing made with sugar, water, egg white, figs, and nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Fig and nuts work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 154 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Fig and Nut Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. In a saucepan, combine the sugar and water. Boil until the mixture becomes brittle when dropped in cold water.

  2. Remove from heat and quickly stir in the beaten egg white.

  3. Add the finely chopped figs and nuts, and mix well.

Assemble

  1. Spread the icing between layers and on top of the cake.

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. Fig + nutstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together154 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Sugar + figtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,241 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Egg + nutstop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,624 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Granulated sugar
Cooks into a syrup that sets firm and gives the icing its sweetness.
Egg white
Beaten into the hot syrup to lighten the icing and help it set with body.
Figs
Add chewy texture and natural fruit sweetness to the icing.
Hickory nuts or walnuts
Add crunch and a toasty, nutty flavour that contrasts the soft icing.

The step that matters

Removing the syrup from heat before adding the egg white. Sugar syrup cooked to the brittle stage is very hot and can keep cooking off the heat. Stirring the egg white in quickly keeps it from scrambling into lumps and gives the icing a smooth, even texture.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Pecansfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, fig. 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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