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To Prepare Syrup for Preserving Fruit

A sugar syrup made by dissolving refined sugar in water with an egg white, then clarifying and straining for fruit preservation.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

To Prepare Syrup for Preserving Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Break the sugar into large lumps and place it in a preserving pan.

  2. Pour 5 pints of cold spring water over the sugar.

  3. Lightly beat the egg white in 1 pint of water and add it to the sugar mixture. Stir to combine.

  4. Set the pan over gentle heat and allow the sugar to dissolve, letting the scum rise undisturbed.

Clarify and strain

  1. After boiling for 5 minutes, remove from heat and let the syrup stand for 2 minutes.

  2. Skim the scum.

  3. Boil again.

  4. Add ½ cup of cold water to bring more scum to the surface, then skim until clear.

  5. Strain the syrup through a thin cloth for use or further boiling.

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

Refined sugar
Forms the sweet base of the syrup and sets the body of the preserving liquid.
Egg white
Binds to impurities and rises as scum, clarifying the syrup when skimmed.

The step that matters

Letting the scum rise undisturbed while the sugar dissolves. Stirring or disturbing the pan breaks up the coagulated egg white and scum, which then stays dispersed and cloudies the syrup. Gentle heat lets the impurities float up so they can be skimmed off cleanly.

“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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