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Sauce

To Clarify Sugar for Preserves

A method to clarify sugar by boiling with water and egg white, removing impurities.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 for Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break the sugar into large lumps and place it in a bowl with the water.

Clarify

  1. Heat the mixture over the fire.

  2. Add the beaten egg white and let it boil.

  3. Wait until the mixture begins to rise.

  4. Add a little cold water to check it.

  5. Remove the mixture from the heat.

  6. Let it sit for 15 minutes.

Skim and pour

  1. Skim off the black scum from the top.

  2. Pour the syrup into a vessel, leaving the sediment behind.

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 the sweetness and bulk that form the syrup being clarified.
Egg white
Coagulates when heated, trapping impurities so they can be skimmed off.
Water
Dissolves the sugar into a syrup that can be heated and clarified.

The step that matters

Let the mixture rise, then rest it off the heat. As the egg white heats it coagulates and traps impurities. The mixture rising and then settling off the heat lets the scum float to the top for skimming and the sediment sink, so the syrup stays 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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