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Dessert

Boiled Icing

A sweet icing made by boiling sugar with water and folding into beaten egg whites.

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 ↓

Boiled Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine 1½ cups granulated sugar with enough boiling water to moisten the sugar thoroughly in a granite kettle.

  2. Boil the mixture without stirring until it threads from the edge of a spoon.

Finish the icing

  1. Pour the syrup onto the well-beaten egg whites and beat until thick.

  2. Add flavoring to taste.

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

Granulated sugar
Dissolves into the syrup that gives the icing its sweetness and body.
Egg whites
Whipped into foam that the hot syrup sets into a light, airy structure.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup without stirring. Stirring can trigger sugar crystals to form, leaving the icing grainy. The syrup must reach the thread stage so it sets to a smooth, glossy texture when beaten into the egg whites.

“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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