Name: Marshmallow Icing and Filling
Ingredients: 2 egg whites; ½ pound marshmallows, cut into small pieces; 2 tablespoons boiling water; Vanilla extract, to taste

Why it works: Egg and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,347 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Marshmallow Icing and Filling

Ingredients

2 egg whites
½ pound marshmallows, cut into small pieces
2 tablespoons boiling water
Vanilla extract, to taste

Directions

Make a boiled icing using the egg whites.
Melt the marshmallows in a double boiler with the boiling water.
Once melted, stir the marshmallow mixture into the boiled icing.
Flavor with vanilla and spread as 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.

Egg + vanillatop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together27,347 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Egg and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 27,347 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites: Whipped with hot syrup to form the light, stable structure of the icing.
Marshmallows: Melt into a sweet, glossy base that adds body and smoothness to the icing.

“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.