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Dessert

Boiled Frosting

A frosting made by boiling sugar and water, then mixing with beaten egg white and flavored or colored as desired.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Boiled Frosting

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 ↓

Boiled Frosting

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the frosting

  1. Boil the sugar and water in a saucepan until clear, without stirring.

  2. Pour the hot mixture over the stiffly beaten egg white and stir well.

  3. Add flavoring and coloring as desired.

Spread and finish

  1. Spread the frosting over the cake using a knife dipped in cold 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

Sugar
Dissolves into syrup that, once cooled, gives the frosting its sweetness and body.
Egg white
Its beaten protein foam gives the frosting structure, lightness and a glossy, set texture.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be boiled into a clear syrup without crystallising.

The step that matters

Boil the sugar and water without stirring. Stirring can agitate the syrup and encourage sugar crystals to form, leaving a grainy frosting. Boiling until clear means the sugar has fully dissolved before the syrup is poured onto 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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