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Dessert

Soft Frosting Without Egg

A simple frosting made by boiling sugar and milk, then cooling and stirring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Soft Frosting Without Egg

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, combine sugar and milk.

  2. Boil for 5 minutes in a double boiler.

  3. Remove from heat and stir vigorously until cooled.

  4. The frosting is ready for use.

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 + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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, as it dissolves and thickens, the body of the frosting.
Milk
Supplies the liquid that dissolves the sugar and forms the frosting's creamy base.

The step that matters

Stirring while the mixture cools. Vigorous stirring as the cooked sugar and milk cool encourages fine sugar crystals, giving a smooth, spreadable texture instead of a grainy one.

“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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