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Dessert

Soft Frosting Without Eggs

A frosting made from sugar, sweet milk, and flavoring, thickened by boiling and beaten until white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Soft Frosting Without Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil sugar and sweet milk in a saucepan for 5 to 8 minutes until it forms a 'hair' when tested on your finger.

  2. Remove from heat and let it cool partially.

  3. Add flavoring and beat the mixture vigorously until it turns white.

  4. If the frosting is too thick, add a little milk to achieve a spreadable consistency.

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 + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
Dissolves into the milk and cooks to a syrup that thickens into the frosting body and sets as it cools.
Sweet milk
Dissolves the sugar and supplies the moisture that the boiled syrup thickens around.

The step that matters

Boiling to the hair stage. Boiling the sugar and milk until it forms a hair-like thread when tested sets the sugar concentration. Too short a boil leaves the frosting runny and slow to set, while overboiling makes it stiff and grainy as it cools.

“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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