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Dessert

Boiled Icing

A simple icing made by boiling sugar and water, then folding into beaten egg whites, optionally flavored with almonds or hickory nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and meat work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 486 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Boiled Icing

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Make the icing

  1. Boil the sugar and hot water briskly for 5 minutes until it threads when dropped from a spoon.

  2. While beating the egg whites, pour the boiling syrup in a small stream into the whites.

  3. If desired, add blanched and pounded almonds or chopped hickory nuts for flavor.

Finish

  1. This will frost the top of two large cakes.

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. Almond + meattop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together486 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

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

  4. Egg + meattop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Egg + almondtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that gives the icing its light, airy structure.
Sugar
Dissolves in hot water to form a syrup that sets the icing and adds sweetness.

The step that matters

Pouring the boiling syrup into the whites. The syrup must be pour in a thin stream while the whites are beaten, so the hot syrup cooks the egg whites gently and blends evenly. Pouring it all at once can leave lumps or unevenly cooked whites.

Swap the almond

The recipe marks almond as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, meat):

  1. Pecansfits about as well
  2. Walnutfits about as well
  3. Almondthe original
  4. Nutsfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, meat. 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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