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Dessert

Honey Combe or Sponge Candy

A sweet candy made by boiling sugar, mixing with egg white, and pouring into a frame to form a honeycomb texture.

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 ↓

Honey Combe or Sponge Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the powdered sugar with the egg white until stiff.

  2. Prepare an 8-inch square frame and place it on a wet slab.

Cook the sugar

  1. Boil the sugar to the crack stage without using cream of tartar.

  2. Lift the pan off the heat and place it on the ground.

Foam and pour

  1. Pour the hot sugar and egg mixture into the pan, adding any coloring or flavoring.

  2. Stir immediately with a spatula; it will rise in a minute or two.

  3. Allow it to fall again, then continue stirring until it begins to rise again.

  4. Pour it out into the frame immediately when it rises.

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

Egg white
Whips into a foam that traps air, giving the candy its light, porous rise.
Loaf or crystal sugar
Cooks to a hard, brittle glass that sets the candy's crisp texture and sweetness.

The step that matters

Pour as soon as it rises. The sugar foam rises and then collapses within moments. Pouring at the peak of the rise traps the air bubbles in the set candy, while waiting too long lets the foam fall and leaves a dense, flat result.

“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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