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Dessert

Frosted Fruits

A fruit salad coated in frothy egg whites and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and sugar 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 ↓

Frosted Fruits

Ingredients

Directions

Coat the fruit

  1. Pick over and wash the fruit.

  2. Whip the egg whites until frothy.

  3. Dip the fruit in the beaten egg, then drain.

  4. Dip the fruit into powdered sugar.

Dry and serve

  1. Cover a pan with white paper and place the fruit on a glass dish.

  2. Dry the fruit, chill, and serve.

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. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  2. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

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

  3. Plum + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together794 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Bind the powdered sugar to the fruit and dry into a thin, crisp coating.
Powdered sugar
Forms a sweet, crisp, frosted coating once it dries on the egg white.

The step that matters

Drain the fruit after dipping in egg white. Excess liquid egg white left on the fruit thins and dissolves the powdered sugar, so the coating turns wet and clumpy instead of forming a dry, even frost.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar. 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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