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Dessert

Boiled Icing

A sweet icing made by boiling sugar and water, then adding beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Boiled Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar and water together until it ropes.

  2. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  3. Pour the syrup into a bowl and stir until it is only milk warm.

Finish the icing

  1. Add the beaten egg whites and beat for an hour.

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

Sugar
Dissolves into the water to form the syrup, providing sweetness and body for the icing.
Egg whites
Trap air when beaten, giving the icing its light, foamy structure.

The step that matters

Cool the syrup to milk warm before adding the egg whites. Very hot syrup would cook the egg whites instead of letting them foam. Cooling it first keeps the whites able to expand and stay stable, so the icing turns out light rather than dense or grainy.

“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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