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To Clarify Sugar for Sweetmeats

A clarified sugar syrup made by dissolving sugar in water, adding egg white, boiling, and skimming off impurities.

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 ↓

To Clarify Sugar for Sweetmeats

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Break the sugar into large lumps and place it in a bowl with the water.

  2. Heat the mixture over the fire until it dissolves.

  3. Add the well-beaten egg white and let it boil.

  4. When it begins to rise, add a little cold water to check the boiling.

  5. Once it rises again, remove it from the heat and let it sit for 15 minutes.

Clarify and pour

  1. Skim off the black scum that forms on top.

  2. Quickly pour the syrup into a vessel, leaving the sediment behind.

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
Dissolves in the water to form the sweet syrup base.
Egg white
Coagulates as it heats, trapping impurities so they can be skimmed off.

The step that matters

Adding cold water when the syrup begins to rise. The cold water briefly cools the boiling mixture, stopping it from overflowing while the egg white continues to coagulate and collect impurities.

“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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