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To Clarify Ravo Sugar Aiid Honey

A clarified mixture of raw sugar and honey with egg whites, water, charcoal, whitening, and lemon zest.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Clarify Ravo Sugar Aiid Honey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the egg whites and water in a large pan.

  2. Add the sugar and powdered charcoal.

  3. Have cold water ready to dampen the sugar.

Clarify

  1. Pour the mixture back and forth until it flows clear.

Make the honey

  1. For honey, combine it with water and add the whitening and lemon zest.

  2. Heat the honey mixture until well combined.

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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Coagulate as they heat and trap impurities so they can be removed from the liquid.
Sugar
Forms the sweet base of the clarified syrup.
Powdered charcoal
Adsorbs impurities and colour from the sugar liquid.
Lemon zest
Adds bright citrus aroma to the honey mixture.

The step that matters

Pour the mixture back and forth until it flows clear. Clarity shows that the coagulated egg whites and charcoal have trapped the impurities. Stopping early leaves cloudiness and dark particles in the syrup.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

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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