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Dessert

Frosting Without Eggs

A simple frosting made by boiling sugar and milk, then cooling and adding flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Frosting Without Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Dampen the sugar with milk in a suitable dish.

  2. Place the dish on the fire and stir until it boils.

  3. Let it boil for 5 minutes without stirring.

  4. Remove from heat and set the dish in cold water.

  5. Add flavoring and stir or beat constantly while it cools until thick and creamy.

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 + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Granulated sugar
Dissolves and cooks into a syrup that sets into the frosting's body as it cools.
Milk
Moistens the sugar so it dissolves evenly and adds softness to the finished frosting.

The step that matters

Let it boil for 5 minutes without stirring. Stirring during boiling can encourage sugar crystals to form, leading to a grainy frosting. Holding the boil time controls how much water evaporates, which sets how thick the frosting becomes as it cools.

“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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