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Transparent Icing

A clear icing made from icing sugar, lemon juice, hot water, and optional flavoring and color.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Transparent Icing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Put the icing sugar into a copper sugar pan.

  2. Add the lemon juice and hot water.

  3. Stir over heat until it boils.

  4. Use as required.

  5. Add the flavoring essence and vegetable color at the end.

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).

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

Icing sugar
Provides the sweetness and the bulk that forms the body of the icing.
Hot water
Dissolves the sugar and thins the mixture to a smooth, pourable consistency.
Lemon juice
Adds a little acidity that brightens the sweetness of the sugar.

The step that matters

Stir over heat until it boils. Constant stirring helps the sugar dissolve fully and keeps it from scorching on the base of the pan. Once it boils, the icing is ready, because further heating thickens the sugar and can make it set hard.

“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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