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Dessert

Boiled Icing

A boiled icing made from sugar, water, and egg white, flavored as desired.

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 ↓

Boiled Icing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the sugar and water together until it forms a soft ball in ice water.

  2. Beat the egg white until stiff.

  3. Pour the boiling syrup over the beaten egg white and stir until thickened.

  4. Add desired flavoring.

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

Granulated sugar
Forms the boiled syrup that sets into a sweet, smooth icing structure.
Egg white
Whipped to foam, it traps air and gives the icing its light, fluffy body.

The step that matters

Pouring the boiling syrup over the egg white. The syrup must be hot enough to cook the egg white partly and thicken the mixture. Pouring it in a thin stream while stirring or beating keeps the egg white from scrambling and helps the icing become smooth and spreadable.

“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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