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To Clarify Sugar and Honey

A method for clarifying sugar and honey by mixing with water, charcoal, 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 Sugar and Honey

Ingredients

Directions

Clarify the sugar

  1. In a large pan, mix 3 egg whites with 3 quarts of water.

  2. Add 25 pounds of sugar and 2.5 pounds of powdered charcoal.

  3. Have cold water ready to dampen the sugar to prevent it from flying.

  4. Use a jelly bag with two receiving vessels to clarify the mixture.

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

Make the honey

  1. For honey, heat it with water and add 5 pounds of fine beaten Spanish whitening and the zest of 3 lemons.

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 when heated, trapping impurities so they can be filtered out.
Powdered charcoal
Adsorbs colour and impurities, helping the syrup clarify to a clear result.
Spanish whitening
Adsorbs colour and impurities in the honey, helping it clarify.

The step that matters

Pour the mixture back and forth until it flows clear. Repeated pouring through the jelly bag filters out the coagulated egg white and charcoal particles. Stopping early leaves cloudy particles and colour 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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