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Dessert

Clarified Syrup

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

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 Syrup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Break sugar into small pieces.

  2. Combine sugar and water in a clean, well-tinned pan.

  3. Stir until sugar dissolves.

  4. Heat over moderate fire.

  5. Add beaten egg white before it warms. Stir well.

Clarify and store

  1. Once boiling, remove scum.

  2. Keep boiling until clear.

  3. Strain through muslin.

  4. Store in a close-stopped bottle for several months.

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

Egg white
Its proteins coagulate when heated and trap impurities, which rise as scum that can be removed for a clear syrup.
Sugar
Dissolves in water to form the syrup, providing sweetness and body.

The step that matters

Remove scum while boiling. Impurities collected by the coagulating egg white must be skimmed off as the syrup boils. If they are left in, or the syrup is not boiled long enough for the white to set, the syrup will stay cloudy rather than 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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