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Sauce

To Clarify Sugar

A method for clarifying sugar by dissolving, boiling, and filtering.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break the sugar into large lumps.

  2. Combine the sugar and water in a bowl.

Clarify

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

  2. Add the egg white and let it boil.

  3. When it begins to rise, pour in a little cold water to check it.

  4. Once it rises a second time, remove it from the heat and let it sit for 15 minutes.

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
Forms the syrup that the clarifying process purifies and sweetens.
Egg white
Coagulates as it heats, trapping impurities so they can be skimmed away.

The step that matters

Adding the cold water when the mixture rises. Cold water briefly lowers the temperature so the foam settles instead of boiling over. Adding it at the right moment lets the coagulated egg white and impurities separate cleanly, leaving a clear syrup.

“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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