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Rock Sugar of All Colours

A sweet candy made by boiling syrup, mixing with egg white and powdered sugar, then cooling to form colored rock-like crystals.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Syrup and sugar match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Rock Sugar of All Colours

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the syrup in a pan until it is almost caramel.

Combine and set

  1. In a small pot, mix the egg white with enough powdered sugar to make a thick paste.

  2. Remove the syrup from the heat and quickly stir in the egg and sugar mixture.

  3. Pour the mixture into a sieve lined with paper before it cools.

  4. Once cooled, the mixture will harden like rock candy.

  5. To change the color, mix your desired food coloring into the egg and sugar mixture before adding it to the syrup.

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. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Syrup + eggtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,995 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Syrup
Provides the sugar that cooks down and hardens into a crisp candy as it cools.
Egg white
Binds with the powdered sugar to form a paste that thickens the syrup mixture.
Powdered sugar
Thickens the egg white into a paste and adds sweetness.

The step that matters

Quickly stir in the egg and sugar mixture off the heat. The mixture thickens as it cools, so stirring promptly while it is still fluid keeps the paste evenly blended into the syrup before it sets.

“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.

More rock candy recipes

Almond 3Strawberry 3 See all 12 →

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