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Cream Nectar

A sweet syrup made by dissolving sugar in boiling water, acid, egg whites, and flavoring, then cooled and served with soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and syrup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Cream Nectar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a large pot, add 4 pounds of granulated sugar to 1 gallon of boiling water and stir until dissolved.

  2. Add 5 ounces of tartaric acid to the mixture.

Add the egg whites

  1. Beat the whites of 3 eggs until frothy.

  2. Pour a little of the warm syrup into a bottle with the egg whites and shake briskly.

  3. Pour the egg mixture back into the kettle of syrup and stir well.

  4. Boil for 3 minutes, skimming off any foam that rises.

Flavor, bottle and serve

  1. Flavor with your preferred extract and bottle for later use.

  2. To serve, mix 2-3 tablespoons of syrup with a tumbler of ice-cold water and add ½ teaspoon of baking soda.

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 + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Egg + syruptop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,995 recipes

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Granulated sugar
Dissolves into the boiling water to form the syrup, providing sweetness and body.
Tartaric acid
Adds acidity that gives the syrup its tart, sharp flavor.
Egg whites
Whipped to foam and folded into the syrup, adding light texture and froth.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic syrup when added at serving, producing fizz.

The step that matters

Boil for 3 minutes, skimming off foam. Egg whites coagulate when heated, so boiling sets them into the syrup. Skimming removes the coagulated foam that would otherwise cloud the syrup and affect its clarity.

“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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