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To Clarify Sugar for Sweetmeats

A clarified sugar syrup made by boiling eggs, water, and sugar and skimming off impurities.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and sugar 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

Prepare

  1. Break the eggs into a large deep copper pan and whisk them.

  2. Pour in the clear water until the pan is half full, creating a soapy mixture.

  3. Add the sugar and place the pan over the fire.

  4. Stir with a large skimmer until the sugar is melted, being careful not to boil over.

Clarify and strain

  1. When it begins to boil and scum rises, remove it from the fire.

  2. Do not stir for half an hour; the scum will rise to the top.

  3. Skim off the scum with a large skimmer.

  4. Return the pan to the fire and let it boil for twenty minutes, skimming continuously.

  5. Strain the syrup through a clean flannel bag into a pan or large stone jar.

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. Egg + sugartop 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

Eggs
Egg whites form a foam that traps impurities so they rise as scum for skimming.
Sugar
Dissolves into the water to form the syrup that is being clarified.
Clear water
Dissolves the sugar and carries the egg foam that collects impurities.

The step that matters

Stirring the sugar while it melts. Stirring keeps the sugar dissolving evenly, but the mixture must not boil over. Boiling over loses syrup and disturbs the scum layer that clarifies it.

“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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