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Dessert

Maple Sugar Icing

A sweet glaze made from maple sugar, butter, and milk or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Maple Sugar Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Grate the maple sugar and place it in a saucepan with the butter and milk.

  2. Boil for ten minutes, stirring constantly in the same direction.

  3. Remove from heat and whip until creamy.

Serve

  1. Use immediately.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. 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

Maple sugar
Provides the main sweetness and flavour, and sets the icing's texture as it cools and is whipped.
Milk or cream
Dissolves the sugar and adds moisture, so the icing stays smooth rather than grainy.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the icing richer and softer on the palate.

The step that matters

Boil for ten minutes, stirring constantly in the same direction. Sugar mixtures can scorch on the bottom of the pan or boil over if left unattended. Constant stirring spreads the heat evenly and keeps the sugar dissolved, which helps prevent grainy crystals and burnt flavour in the finished icing.

“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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