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Dessert

Boiled or Fondant Icing

A sugar icing made by boiling sugar, cooling on marble, then kneading and dissolving with lemon juice and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Boiled or Fondant Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the fondant

  1. Boil 5 lbs of sugar with 1 qt of water until it reaches a boil.

  2. Pour the mixture onto a cool, wet marble slab.

  3. Use ½-inch iron bars to contain it.

  4. Use a scraper to work the mixture toward you until it becomes white and hard.

  5. Pack and knead the fondant tightly in a jar.

  6. Cover it with a wet cloth.

Dissolve and ice

  1. Take a portion of fondant in a saucepan.

  2. Add a little lemon juice and water.

  3. Stir to dissolve over heat.

  4. Ice your goods immediately after dissolving.

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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the sweet crystalline structure of the fondant once worked into a smooth paste.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be boiled into a syrup that crystallises when worked.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that helps prevent the sugar from recrystallising into a grainy texture.

The step that matters

Working the mixture on the slab. Scraping and kneading the cooled syrup until it turns white and hard forms many fine sugar crystals, which gives fondant its smooth texture. Working it while still too warm or too loose can leave it grainy or sticky.

“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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