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Dessert

Frosted Fruit

Fruit coated in beaten egg whites and powdered sugar, then dried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and plum match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Frosted Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off half the stem from the cherries.

  2. Beat the egg whites in one dish.

  3. Place powdered sugar in another dish.

Coat and dry

  1. Roll each piece of fruit in the egg whites, then in the sugar.

  2. Lay the coated fruit on a sheet of white paper in a sieve.

  3. Set the sieve on top of the stove or near the fire until the icing hardens.

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. Apricot + plumtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Apricot + grapetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together477 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Plum + grapetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together238 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

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

  5. 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

Whites of eggs
Beaten whites give the sugar a sticky base and harden into a crisp, glossy coating when gently heated.
Powdered sugar
Clings to the wet whites and dries into a sweet, crisp, white shell around the fruit.

The step that matters

Drying the coated fruit until the icing hardens. Egg white proteins set into a firm coating only as they warm and dry. If the fruit is taken off the heat too early, the sugar stays sticky and can slide off or weep.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, plum, 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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