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Dessert

Royal Icing

A smooth, bright white icing made from icing sugar, egg white, and lemon juice.

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

Royal Icing

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Place the egg white in a bowl.

  2. Gradually add the icing sugar while mixing with a wooden spoon.

  3. Continue mixing until the mixture is smooth and has a brilliant white appearance.

  4. Add the lemon juice and mix well.

Use

  1. Use the icing as required.

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).

  2. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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 sweetness and bulk, and sets firm as the icing dries.
Egg white
Gives the icing its body and structure, and helps it dry to a hard finish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Add the icing sugar gradually. Adding the icing sugar a little at a time lets the egg white take it in evenly, so the icing becomes smooth. Adding it all at once can leave lumps and a dull, uneven texture that is hard to fix.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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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