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Dessert

Wine Icing

A glaze made by boiling sugar and water, then adding wine, lemon juice, and icing sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Wine and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,157 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Wine Icing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil 1 cup of sugar with ½ cup water until it reaches the crack stage.

  2. Add ⅓ cup wine.

  3. Add lemon juice.

  4. Add 1 tablespoon icing sugar.

  5. Stir for a few minutes over the heat, but do not boil.

  6. 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. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 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. Wine + sugartop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9,581 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

Sugar
Sweetens the icing and, cooked to the crack stage, sets firm as it cools.
Wine
Adds liquid and flavour to the icing.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that helps keep the sugar syrup from crystallising.
Icing sugar
Dissolves quickly, giving the icing a smooth, fine texture.

The step that matters

Stir over heat without boiling. Once the syrup has reached the crack stage, boiling it again drives off more water and overcooks the sugar, making the icing too hard or grainy. Gentle stirring keeps it smooth and workable.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Grapefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wine, sugar. 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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