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Dessert

Boiled Icing

A sweet icing made by boiling sugar and water, then folding in beaten egg white.

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 ↓

Boiled Icing

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar and water in a pan and bring to a boil without stirring until it hardens in cold water or forms threads from the spoon.

Whip and finish

  1. Beat the egg white to stiff peaks.

  2. Slowly pour the boiling syrup over the beaten egg white, starting slowly and increasing speed until all syrup is used.

  3. Continue beating until the mixture is almost cold and has a hard consistency.

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

White sugar
Forms the sweet syrup that sets into the icing's firm, glossy body.
Egg white
Whipped to stiff peaks, it traps air and gives the icing its light, fluffy structure.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be heated into a syrup without burning.

The step that matters

Pouring the boiling syrup into the egg white. The syrup must reach the right temperature and be poured slowly while beating. Pouring too fast can deflate the whipped egg white, and syrup that is not hot enough will not cook the egg white or set the icing properly.

“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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