Skip to main content
Dessert

Clarifying Loaf Sugar

A process to clarify loaf sugar by boiling with water, egg whites, and ivory black.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Clarifying Loaf Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break the sugar into small pieces and place in a large copper pan.

  2. Add 1 pint of water for every 2 pounds of sugar.

  3. Beat the egg whites until frothy and mix them in.

Clarify

  1. Heat the mixture until it begins to boil, adding cold water to prevent overflow.

  2. Allow the sugar to rise three times, cooling with cold water each time.

  3. On the fourth rise, skim off the scum until no more appears.

Strain and whiten

  1. Strain the sugar through a fine cloth or flannel bag.

  2. To make the sugar extra white, mix in 1 pound of ivory black thoroughly.

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

Loaf sugar
Forms the sweet syrup that is clarified and then crystallised into the finished sugar.
Egg whites
Coagulate when heated, trapping impurities so they rise as scum that can be skimmed off.
Ivory black
Adsorbs colouring impurities from the syrup, making the sugar whiter.

The step that matters

Skimming the scum on the fourth rise. Egg white coagulates with impurities and rises as scum. Skimming until no more appears removes these particles, so the syrup stays clear. Leaving scum behind leaves the sugar cloudy and dull.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes