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Dessert

White Enamel Icing

A glossy icing made from powdered gum arabic, sugar, egg white, and tropical fruit flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

White Enamel Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve the powdered gum arabic in cold water.

  2. Add granulated sugar and boil until it spins a thread from the end of the spoon.

Finish and spread

  1. Pour the mixture into the whipped egg white and stir until well mixed.

  2. Flavor with Snel's Tropical Fruits.

  3. Spread while warm on cake using a spatula dipped in hot water.

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

Egg white
Whipped into foam, it gives the icing its light, airy structure.
Granulated sugar
Boiled into a concentrated syrup, it sweetens and sets the icing as it cools.
Powdered gum arabic
Acts as a stabilizer that helps keep the icing smooth and prevents it from weeping.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar to the thread stage. The syrup must reach the thread stage, where it is concentrated enough to set once cooled. Underboiled syrup stays runny and will not hold on the cake, while overboiled syrup turns stiff and grainy before it can be mixed into the egg white.

“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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