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To Clarify Sugar

A clarified sugar syrup made by dissolving sugar, adding egg white, boiling, and skimming to produce a clear liquid for fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Break or roll the sugar into very small pieces.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the sugar with 1½ cups of cold water for every pound of sugar.

  3. Stir until the sugar is dissolved, then add the beaten egg white.

  4. Heat the mixture on the stove, stirring until it boils.

  5. Pour in 1 cup of cold water and let it boil again.

Clarify and finish

  1. Remove from heat and let it settle for 15 minutes.

  2. Carefully skim off any foam from the top.

  3. Gently pour the clear syrup into another pan, avoiding any sediment at the bottom.

  4. Boil the clear syrup for about 20 minutes before adding the fruit.

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

Sugar
Provides sweetness and forms the syrup that the fruit is cooked in.
Egg white
Binds impurities into foam that can be skimmed off, leaving a clear syrup.

The step that matters

Skimming off the foam and leaving sediment behind. Stirring or pouring too roughly mixes the coagulated egg white and impurities back into the syrup, making it cloudy. Settling first and pouring gently keeps the syrup clear.

“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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