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Dessert

Icing

A light icing made from beaten egg whites and sugar, optionally flavored with lemon, tartaric acid, strawberry or cranberry juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and syrup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Icing

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Place the egg whites in a shallow dish.

  2. Sprinkle part of the sugar over the egg whites and beat for 30 minutes.

  3. Gradually stir in the remaining sugar and add flavoring.

  4. For colored icing, add strawberry juice or cranberry syrup.

  5. For yellow icing, squeeze lemon juice and grated rind into the mixture.

Ice and set the cake

  1. Spread the icing on a well-floured and wiped cake using a large knife dipped in cold water.

  2. Set the frosted cake in a cool, dry place or a moderate oven to harden.

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 + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Strawberry + cranberrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together60 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  3. Lemon + cranberrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together210 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Lemon + strawberrytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,206 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. 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

Egg whites
Whipped to form the foam structure that gives the icing its body and light texture.
Fine white sugar
Sweetens the icing and, once beaten into the foam, dries and hardens into a crisp coating.

The step that matters

Beating the sugar into the egg whites. Beating for the full 30 minutes after adding the first portion of sugar lets the egg white foam stabilise, so the icing holds its shape. Adding the rest of the sugar gradually keeps the foam from collapsing.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, strawberry, cranberry, syrup):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, strawberry, cranberry, syrup. 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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