Skip to main content
Dessert

To Clarify Loaf Sugar

This recipe clarifies loaf sugar by boiling it with water and egg white, skimming scum, and straining the clarified syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

To Clarify Loaf Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break the loaf sugar into a copper pan.

  2. Add ½ pint of water for each pound of sugar.

  3. Mix in 1 egg white for every 6 lbs of sugar.

Clarify

  1. When it begins to boil, add a little cold water to prevent boiling over.

  2. Skim the mixture the fourth time it rises.

  3. Continue adding cold water each time until the scum stops rising.

  4. Strain the mixture through a sieve, cloth, or flannel bag.

  5. Save the scum for clarification or to add to fermented wines.

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

Loaf sugar
Is the main ingredient that is dissolved and purified into a clear syrup.
Egg white
Coagulates as it heats, trapping impurities so they can be skimmed off as scum.

The step that matters

Adding cold water when the mixture boils. Cold water briefly lowers the temperature of the boiling syrup, stopping it from boiling over. Repeating this as scum rises lets the coagulated impurities separate cleanly for skimming.

“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.

More clarified sugar recipes

Syrup 24 See all 81 →

You might also like

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