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To Crystallize Fruit

A method of coating fruit with sugar crystals using beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and sugar 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 ↓

To Crystallize Fruit

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Select the finest fruit, leaving the stalks on.

  2. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

Coat the fruit

  1. Dip the fruit in the beaten egg with the stalks facing up.

  2. Drain the excess egg and beat it again.

  3. Individually dip the fruit into the powdered sugar.

Dry and serve

  1. Line a pan with parchment paper and place the fruit inside.

  2. Set the pan in a cooling oven until the icing firms.

  3. Arrange the fruit on a dish and store in a cool place.

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. Egg + sugartop 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

Egg whites
Beaten to stiff foam, they form a glossy coating that dries into a firm icing shell.
Finely powdered sugar
Dusts over the egg coating and dries into a sweet, crisp icing layer.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites until stiff. Stiff egg whites trap air and hold the coating on the fruit. Under-beaten whites run off and dry thin, while over-beaten whites turn grainy and crumble.

“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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