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Dessert

Boiled White Frosting

A frosting made by boiling sugar and water, then adding beaten egg whites and cooking until thick.

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 White Frosting

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pour boiling water over the sugar to dissolve lumps.

  2. Beat the egg whites lightly.

Make the frosting

  1. Add the beaten egg whites to the sugar and water mixture.

  2. Place the mixture in a dish over boiling water.

  3. Stir the mixture continuously.

  4. Once thickened, remove from heat.

Finish

  1. Beat the mixture until thick enough to spread.

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

White sugar
Dissolves into a syrup that sweetens the frosting and gives it body.
Egg whites
Their proteins set with gentle heat, thickening the frosting and giving it a light, spreadable structure.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture continuously over the heat. Egg white proteins begin to set as they warm. Constant stirring spreads the heat evenly so the whites thicken smoothly instead of scrambling or cooking onto the dish.

“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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