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Smooth or Candy Sugar

A thick syrup made from water and sugar, boiled with egg white to produce smooth candy sugar.

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

Smooth or Candy Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Break the egg white into a large pot and add the water. Whisk until frothy.

  2. Stir in the sugar and place the pot over heat.

  3. When it boils, add a little cold water and repeat until thick scum forms on top.

  4. Remove from heat, let it settle, then skim off the scum and strain through a bag.

  5. If the sugar isn't fine, boil again before straining.

  6. To check smoothness, dip a skimmer into the sugar and touch it between your fingers. A small thread should form and break easily.

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 white
Its proteins coagulate when heated and trap impurities, forming scum that can be skimmed off.
Sugar
Forms the syrup being clarified; its crystals are dissolved, then the syrup is strained to remove particles.

The step that matters

Skimming and straining after the scum forms. Removing the scum only after it settles and forms a thick layer clears impurities from the syrup. Skimming too early or too late leaves cloudiness or loses clear syrup.

“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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