Skip to main content
Dessert

Frosted Fruit

Fruit coated in sugar after being dipped in an egg white and water mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Currant and grape work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 346 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Frosted Fruit

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Coat the fruit

  1. Beat the egg white with the water on a plate until frothy.

  2. Dip each bunch of fruit in the egg white mixture.

  3. Roll the fruit in the castor sugar until completely covered.

Dry the fruit

  1. Place the fruit on white paper on a sieve.

  2. Put the sieve before the fire or in a cool oven until the frosting is dry and hard.

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. Currant + grapetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together346 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,490 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Currant + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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 white
Forms a thin, sticky film that holds the sugar and dries into a crisp, glossy coating.
Castor sugar
Forms the sweet, crystalline frosted coating that hardens as the egg white dries.

The step that matters

Drying until hard. The egg white sets as it dries, so the frosting must dry fully. Gentle, low heat dries it slowly without browning or melting the sugar, leaving a crisp finish. If it is under-dried, the coating stays tacky.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Red currantfits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against currant, sugar, egg. 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.

You might also like

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesGrape SherbetGrape Sherbet32 recipesGrapefruit MarmaladeGrapefruit Marmalade16 recipes