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To Clarify Sugar

Clarifies sugar by dissolving it in water with egg white and boiling until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

To Clarify Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break the sugar into small lumps and place it in a saucepan.

  2. Pour 1 pint of water over the sugar and let it sit for a while.

Clarify

  1. Add the beaten egg white and stir until the sugar is completely dissolved.

  2. Bring to a boil, then add 1 pint of cold water.

  3. Allow it to boil again, then remove from heat.

  4. Let it settle for 15 minutes and remove the scum.

Finish

  1. Return to heat and boil until thick enough.

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

Sugar
Dissolves into the syrup and provides the sweetness and body as it thickens on boiling.
Egg white
Its proteins set when heated and trap impurities, which rise as scum that can then be removed.

The step that matters

Let it settle for 15 minutes and remove the scum. As the egg white cooks, it coagulates and gathers impurities into a scum on the surface. Letting the syrup rest and skimming this scum off before the final boil keeps the sugar clear instead of cloudy.

“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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