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Dessert

Plain Icing

A simple icing made from powdered sugar, egg whites, lemon juice, and rose water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and rose are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,174 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Plain Icing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix powdered sugar, egg whites, lemon juice, and rose water in a bowl and stir until smooth.

  2. Spread over the cake using a knife dipped in cold water.

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. Lemon + rosetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  3. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

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

  5. Sugar + rosetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,584 recipes

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

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

Powdered sugar
Provides sweetness and bulk, and dissolves into the liquids to form a smooth icing.
Egg whites
Add body and help the icing set into a smooth, firm coating as it dries.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and helps keep the icing light in flavour.

The step that matters

Stirring until smooth. Powdered sugar can leave lumps that stay visible on the finished surface if not fully dissolved. Thorough stirring lets the sugar blend evenly with the liquids, giving a smooth, even coating.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg, rose):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Raisinfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, rose. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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