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Dessert

Icing, Fondant

A sugar-based icing made by boiling sugar, water, and cream of tartar until it reaches 230°F, then cooled and poured over cake.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Icing, Fondant

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine the sugar and cream of tartar in a saucepan.

  2. Add water or lemon juice and dissolve the sugar.

  3. Boil quickly, skim off any foam, cover, and boil for 1-2 minutes.

  4. Insert a thermometer and boil until it reaches 230°F (110°C).

Finish and apply

  1. Pour the mixture into a basin and stir with a spatula or wooden spoon until it turns white and creamy.

  2. Pour the icing over the cake. Flavor with essence and color as desired.

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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Cream + lemontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

Loaf sugar
Forms the sweet body of the icing once dissolved and recrystallized.
Cream of tartar
Acid that helps prevent large sugar crystals, keeping the icing smooth.

The step that matters

Stirring until white and creamy. Stirring the boiled syrup as it cools encourages fine sugar crystals to form, which makes the icing opaque and smooth. Stirring too early or too late can leave it runny or grainy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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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