Name: Eggless Icing
Ingredients: 1 cup confectioners' sugar; 2 tablespoons milk; pink sugar or chocolate (optional); flavoring (optional)

Why it works: Sugar and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Eggless Icing

Ingredients

1 cup confectioners' sugar
2 tablespoons milk
pink sugar or chocolate (optional)
flavoring (optional)

Directions

Make the icing

In a bowl, combine confectioners' sugar and milk.
Beat thoroughly until smooth.

Finish and serve

Spread the icing on a cold cake.
Let it sit for a while to whiten.
Add color or flavor as desired.

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.

Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Confectioners' sugar: Provides sweetness and the bulk that makes up the icing body.
Milk: Dissolves the sugar and gives the icing its smooth, spreadable moisture.

“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.