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Dessert

Boiled Icing

A simple icing made by boiling sugar and water, then folding in beaten egg white and vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Boiled Icing

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar and water until it forms a string when dropped from a spoon.

Whip and finish

  1. Beat the egg white until stiff.

  2. Gradually beat the syrup into the egg white.

  3. Flavor with vanilla and beat until cold and smooth.

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 + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

  3. Egg + vanillatop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together27,347 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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
Dissolved into syrup that sets the icing firm and sweet as it cools.
Egg white
Whipped into a foam that gives the icing its light, airy structure.
Vanilla extract
Adds aroma that rounds out the sweetness of the icing.

The step that matters

Gradually beat the syrup into the egg white. Hot syrup poured in slowly is absorbed and partly cooks the egg white, stabilizing the foam. Pouring it all at once can deflate the foam and leave the icing runny or grainy.

“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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