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Dessert

Frosting Without Eggs

A simple frosting made by boiling sugar and milk, then beating until cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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. Combine sugar and milk in a saucepan.

  2. Boil for 3 to 4 minutes.

  3. Remove from heat and beat until cold.

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

Sugar
Provides sweetness and, once boiled and cooled, the thick body of the frosting.
Milk
Dissolves the sugar and adds moisture so the boiled mixture can be beaten into a spreadable frosting.

The step that matters

Beat until cold. Beating while the mixture cools encourages fine sugar crystals to form, giving a smooth, spreadable texture rather than a grainy one. Beating while it is still hot leads to a runny or gritty result.

“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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