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Dessert

Icing Sauce

A simple icing sauce made from sugar, water, egg whites, and vanilla, served over pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Icing Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Moisten the sugar with water in a saucepan.

  2. Bring to a boil and cook for exactly 4 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove from heat and stir in the beaten egg whites and vanilla.

  2. Serve over pudding.

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 + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Egg + vanillatop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together27,347 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Sugar
Provides sweetness and, when boiled, forms the syrup that sets the icing's body.
Egg whites
Whipped whites trap air and set with the hot syrup, giving a light, airy texture.
Vanilla
Adds aroma and a sweet, rounded flavour to the icing.

The step that matters

Cooking the syrup for exactly 4 minutes. Boiling sugar and water concentrates the syrup, and the time at the boil controls how thick it becomes. Too short leaves it thin, too long makes it stiff. Timing it exactly keeps the texture consistent when the egg whites are added.

“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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