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To Candy Sugar

A method for candying sugar by boiling with water and egg white.

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 Candy Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Break the egg white into a preserving pan.

  2. Add 4 quarts of water and whisk to a froth.

  3. Mix in 12 pounds of sugar.

  4. Set the mixture over the fire.

Clarify

  1. When it boils, add a little cold water until scum rises thick on top.

  2. Remove from heat.

  3. Let it settle.

  4. Take off the scum and strain through a bag.

  5. If the sugar isn't fine, boil again before straining.

Boil and test

  1. After straining, boil the sugar until smooth.

  2. Check for a small thread when dipped with a skimmer.

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

Egg white
Its proteins rise to form a foam and then coagulate, trapping impurities so they can be skimmed off.
Sugar
Forms the sweet syrup that is boiled down and cooked to the final stage.

The step that matters

Adding cold water when it boils. Cold water stops the boiling and cools the surface, so the coagulated egg white and impurities rise as thick scum that can be removed. Adding it too early or too little leaves the syrup cloudy.

“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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