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Dessert

Marshmallow Icing

A sweet icing made by boiling sugar, whisking into egg whites, adding marshmallows, and flavoring with vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Marshmallow Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil 2 cups of granulated sugar with ½ cup of water until it reaches 240°F (115°C) or spins a thread about 3 inches long.

Make the icing

  1. Pour the sugar mixture in a fine stream over 4 well-beaten egg whites, beating constantly.

  2. When cool, add ½ pound of fresh marshmallows, each cut into 4 pieces.

  3. Ensure the marshmallows do not melt in the icing, which should be light and fluffy.

  4. Flavor with vanilla.

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

Granulated sugar
Forms the syrup that sets the icing and provides sweetness.
Egg whites
Whipped with the hot syrup to build a light, stable foam for the icing.
Fresh marshmallows
Add sweetness and a soft, airy body to the finished icing.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot syrup into the egg whites. The hot syrup cooks the egg whites as it is beaten in, creating a stable foam. Pouring too fast or stopping the beating can leave the whites lumpy, grainy, or deflated.

“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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