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Dessert

Maple Icing

A sweet glaze made by boiling maple syrup, mixing with egg white, and optionally adding nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Maple syrup and nuts work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 67 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Maple Icing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the maple syrup until it hardens in water.

  2. Beat the hot syrup into the well-beaten egg white.

  3. Fold in chopped nuts if desired.

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. Maple syrup + nutstop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together67 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Maple syrup + eggtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Egg + nutstop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,624 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Maple syrup
Sugar that cooks to a thick syrup and sets into the icing's sweet body.
Egg white
Whipped foam that gives the icing lightness and a fluffy, airy texture.

The step that matters

Boil the maple syrup until it hardens in water. Sugar syrup must reach the correct concentration to set properly. Undercooked syrup stays runny and will not firm up, while overcooked syrup turns brittle and grainy. Testing a drop in cold water shows when it has reached the right stage.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (maple syrup, egg):

  1. Pecansfits better
  2. Walnutfits about as well
  3. Nutsthe original
  4. Flaxseedfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against maple syrup, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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