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Dessert

Maple Sugar Filling

A sweet filling made by dissolving maple sugar in boiling water, thickening, and folding into beaten egg whites.

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 ↓

Maple Sugar Filling

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Dissolve the maple sugar in boiling water.

  2. Boil without stirring until it threads from the spoon.

  3. Slowly beat the syrup into the stiffly whipped egg whites.

  4. Add 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. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  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

Soft maple sugar
Provides the sweetness and maple flavor that make up the filling.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff foam, they give the filling its light, airy structure.

The step that matters

Boil without stirring until it threads from the spoon. Stirring during boiling can cause sugar to crystallize, making the syrup grainy. Boiling must continue until the syrup reaches the thread stage so it sets properly when beaten into the whites.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Pecansfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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