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Dessert

Plain Icing

A light, stiff meringue icing made from egg white, powdered sugar, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Plain Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Break the egg white into a clean, cold bowl.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of powdered sugar to the egg white and whip it in with a fork or egg-beater using sidelong sweeps.

  3. Continue to fold in the remaining powdered sugar while adding lemon juice or other flavoring.

  4. Beat until you achieve a smooth, stiff meringue.

Ice the cake

  1. Pour the icing onto the center of the cake and smooth it over the top and sides with a wet knife.

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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg white
Whipped into a foam that gives the icing its light, stiff structure and glossy finish.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the icing and stiffens the whipped egg white as it dissolves into the foam.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and helps stabilise the whipped egg white.

The step that matters

Beat until smooth and stiff. Egg white foams only when beaten enough to trap air, and the sugar must be added gradually. Under-beating leaves the icing runny and grainy, while over-beating makes it dry and brittle, so stop when it holds stiff peaks and looks smooth.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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