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Dessert

Simple Icing

A simple icing made from sugar, water, and egg white, boiled to a rope and beaten until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Simple Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, combine 1 cup of granulated sugar and 5 tablespoons of water.

  2. Stir until the sugar dissolves, then stop stirring.

  3. Boil the mixture until it ropes, forming a continuous string when tested with a teaspoon.

Make the icing

  1. In a separate bowl, beat the egg white until thoroughly mixed.

  2. Pour the thick syrup into the beaten egg white while someone else beats it continuously.

  3. Beat for 2 to 3 minutes until the mixture is thick and creamy.

  4. Pour the icing immediately over the cake, as it will harden quickly once cooled.

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

Granulated sugar
Dissolves into the water and cooks into a thick syrup that gives the icing its sweetness and body.
Egg white
Beaten with the hot syrup to form a light, stable foam that thickens the icing.

The step that matters

Stopping the stirring after the sugar dissolves. Stirring a boiling sugar syrup encourages crystals to form, which can make the icing grainy. Once the sugar has dissolved, leaving the pan alone lets the syrup cook smoothly to the rope stage.

“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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