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 and Boil Sugar
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the syrup
Break the sugar into large lumps.
Place the lumps in a preserving pan.
For syrup, add 6 cups of cold water for every pound of sugar.
For candying, add ⅓ cup of water for each pound.
Beat the egg and mix it with the water.
Pour the mixture over the sugar.
When the sugar is nearly melted, stir it well.
Clarify
Place the pan over a gentle fire.
Do not stir after the scum begins to rise.
Let it boil for 5 minutes.
Remove from heat.
Let it stand for 1-2 minutes.
Carefully remove the scum.
Return the pan to the heat.
When the syrup boils, add a little cold water to help clear the scum.
Boil until the scum rises.
Remove from heat.
Skim off the scum.
Repeat until clear.
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.
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Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Its proteins coagulate when heated and trap impurities, which rise as scum that can be skimmed off.
- Cold water
- Dissolves the sugar into a syrup and, added later, helps settle the scum as the syrup boils.
The step that matters
Do not stir after the scum begins to rise. Stirring breaks the forming scum layer apart and mixes impurities back into the syrup, so the sugar stays cloudy and harder to 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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