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Chocolate Glaze or Boiled Icing

A boiled chocolate glaze made with sugar, water, chocolate, eggs, and vanilla extract.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Chocolate and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,020 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Chocolate Glaze or Boiled Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar and water together in a deep saucepan for five minutes.

  2. Add the grated chocolate and stir until melted.

Finish the icing

  1. When a drop in cold water sets hard, stir in the eggs rapidly while beating.

  2. Let cook for about five more minutes, stirring constantly.

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. Chocolate + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,020 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Egg + vanillatop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together27,347 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Granulated sugar
Sweetens the icing and, when boiled, forms the syrup that gives it body and set.
Grated chocolate
Adds chocolate flavor and richness, and melts into the hot syrup to darken it.
Eggs
Thicken the mixture as their proteins set with heat, giving the icing structure.

The step that matters

Beating the eggs into the hot syrup. Egg proteins set when hot, so adding them to the syrup can scramble them. Beating rapidly disperses the eggs through the syrup before they set. Constant stirring during the final cooking keeps the icing smooth and stops it catching on the pan.

“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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