Skip to main content
Dessert

To Crystalize Fruit

Fruit coated in beaten egg whites and powdered sugar, then dried to form a hard glaze.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Egg and sugar 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 Crystalize Fruit

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Select the finest fruit, leaving the stones in.

Ice the fruit

  1. Beat the egg whites to a stiff froth.

  2. Dip the fruit in the beaten egg with the stem upward.

  3. Drain the excess egg.

  4. Beat the egg whites again.

  5. Dip each piece of fruit into a cup of finely powdered sugar.

  6. Cover a pan with fine paper and place the fruit on it.

  7. Set the pan in a cool oven until the icing firms.

Serve

  1. Pile the fruit on a dish and place it in a cold area.

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. Egg + sugartop 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

Egg whites
Form a thin, glossy icing coating that dries and firms around the fruit.
Finely powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and forms a crisp, dry sugar coating over the egg white layer.

The step that matters

Setting the icing in a cool oven. Egg white firms as its proteins set with gentle heat. If the oven is too hot, the icing can brown or weep, and if too cool it may stay sticky.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes