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Dessert

Boiled Icing

A stiff egg white icing thickened with boiled sugar syrup, optionally colored with cranberry or citrus rind and studded with nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cranberry and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 230 recipes. Both carry ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Boiled Icing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Beat the egg whites to a stiff froth.

  2. In a basin, combine the sugar and boiling water.

  3. Boil briskly for 5 minutes until it drops in threads from the spoon.

  4. Pour the syrup in a small stream onto the beaten egg while beating constantly.

  5. For color, add cranberry juice for pink or grated orange/lemon rind with a little juice for yellow.

  6. Optionally, mix in chopped almonds or hickory nuts.

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. Cranberry + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together230 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  2. Cranberry + almondtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together41 recipes

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

  3. Orange + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Beaten to a stiff froth, they trap air and form the light, foamy structure of the icing.
Granulated sugar
Boiled with water into a syrup that sets the icing and gives it sweetness.

The step that matters

Pour the syrup in a small stream while beating constantly. Hot syrup poured slowly into the whites, with constant beating, cooks the egg proteins gently and blends them evenly. Pouring too fast or stopping the beater can leave lumps or deflate the foam.

Swap the cranberry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Cranberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, orange, almond. 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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