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To Clarify Sugar

A clarified sugar syrup made by dissolving sugar in water, adding egg whites, boiling, and skimming the scum.

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 ↓

To Clarify Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve the sugar in warm water, using ½ pint for every pound.

  2. Add the whipped egg whites to the dissolved sugar.

  3. Heat the mixture until it boils.

  4. Add 1 teacup of cold water.

  5. Once it boils again, remove from heat.

Clarify and strain

  1. Let it settle for 20 minutes.

  2. Skim the scum from the top.

  3. Pour the syrup into a clean vessel, leaving sediment behind.

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

Fine white loaf sugar
Provides the sweetness and dissolves to form the syrup itself.
Egg whites
Coagulate when heated, trapping impurities so they can be skimmed off as scum.

The step that matters

Adding the egg whites and heating until it boils. The whites must be fully whipped and mixed in before heating so they coagulate evenly and gather impurities. Removing the heat once it boils again keeps the syrup from over-reducing or scorching while the scum rises.

“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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