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Dessert

To Prepare Syrup for Candies

A simple syrup made from sugar, water, egg white, and optional cream of tartar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

To Prepare Syrup for Candies

Ingredients

Directions

Dissolve and combine

  1. Dissolve the sugar in the water in a saucepan.

  2. Add the egg white and beat the mixture well.

Skim the scum

  1. Bring to a boil, then remove from heat and skim off the scum.

  2. Add a little more water and repeat skimming until no scum forms.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Sugar
Provides the sweetness and dissolves to form the syrup itself.
Egg white
Coagulates when heated and traps impurities so they can be skimmed off.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity that helps prevent the sugar from crystallizing.

The step that matters

Skim off all the scum. As the syrup heats, the egg white coagulates and carries impurities to the surface. Scum left in the syrup can make it cloudy and encourage grainy texture, so skim until no more forms.

“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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