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Dessert

Boiled Icing

A sweet icing made by boiling sugar and pouring the syrup over an unbeaten egg white, then beating until frothy.

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 1 cup of sugar in enough water to cover it.

  2. Continue boiling until the mixture becomes ropy.

Finish the icing

  1. Pour the boiling syrup over the unbeaten egg white.

  2. Beat rapidly with a knife until frothy.

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 a syrup that sets into the sweet body of the icing as it cools.
Egg white
Whips into a foam that traps air and gives the icing its light, fluffy structure.

The step that matters

Pour the syrup while it is boiling hot and beat right away. Hot syrup partly cooks the egg white and helps set its foam. If the syrup cools before it is poured, or the beating waits, the egg white will not thicken and trap air properly.

“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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