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Clarified Sugar or Water Ices

A frozen dessert made by boiling clarified sugar and water with egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Clarified Sugar or Water Ices

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve 1½ pounds of sugar in 1 pint of water.

  2. Beat and stir in half of a large egg white.

Clarify and cool

  1. Bring the mixture to a boil and boil for 10 minutes, skimming frequently.

  2. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

  3. Let it cool before using.

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

Sugar
Provides the sweetness and dissolves into the syrup that becomes the ice.
Egg white
Its proteins set when heated and trap impurities, which rise so they can be skimmed off.

The step that matters

Boil and skim the mixture. Boiling sets the egg white proteins, which gather impurities and bring them to the surface as foam. Skimming this foam off as it forms keeps the syrup clear.

“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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