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Drink

Cream Nectar

A sweet, syrupy beverage made with boiling water, sugar, tartaric acid, egg whites, flavor extract, syrup, ice water, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and syrup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Cream Nectar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Add 4 pounds of granulated sugar and 5 ounces of tartaric acid to 1 gallon of boiling water.

  2. Beat the whites of 3 eggs.

  3. Pour a little warm syrup into a bottle.

  4. Shake the bottle briskly.

  5. Pour the egg mixture into the kettle of syrup.

  6. Stir the mixture well.

  7. Boil for 3 minutes, removing scum as it rises.

Flavor and bottle

  1. Flavor the mixture with your preferred extract.

  2. Bottle the mixture for use.

  3. Mix 2-3 tablespoons of syrup with 1 tumbler of ice-cold water.

  4. Add ½ teaspoon of baking soda.

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 + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Egg + syruptop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,995 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Granulated sugar
Provides sweetness and body to the syrup, the base of the drink.
Tartaric acid
Adds acidity for a tart, sharp flavor and helps keep the sugar from crystallizing.
Egg whites
Whipped and folded in, they add foam and a light, airy texture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid to release carbon dioxide, producing fizz.

The step that matters

Boil for 3 minutes, removing scum as it rises. Boiling briefly sets the egg white foam and lets impurities rise to the surface, where they can be skimmed off. Skipping the skimming leaves a cloudy, less clean syrup.

“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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