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Boiled Icing with Baisins

A sweet icing made by boiling sugar and water, then mixing with beaten egg white and raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and raisin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,481 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Boiled Icing with Baisins

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Boil the sugar and water until it threads from the spoon.

  2. Pour the syrup onto the beaten egg white and beat with an egg beater until thick enough to spread.

  3. Reserve some icing for the top layer and mix the chopped raisins into the remaining icing.

Assemble the cake

  1. Spread the icing with raisins between the layers of the cake.

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 + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Raisin + eggtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,556 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Dissolves into the syrup that, once beaten, gives the icing sweetness and body.
Egg white
Beaten with hot syrup, it forms a foam that sets into a light, spreadable icing.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness to the icing filling.

The step that matters

Boil the sugar and water until it threads from the spoon. Sugar must reach the right concentration for the icing to set. Too little boiling leaves a runny syrup that won't thicken; too much makes the icing hard and brittle once cooled.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Lemonfits about as well
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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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