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Boiled Icing

A sweet icing made by boiling sugar syrup and folding it into beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine 3 cups of sugar and 1½ cups of water in a saucepan. Boil until it reaches a hair stage.

  2. Beat the egg whites until very stiff.

  3. Pour the syrup over the beaten egg whites, leaving about 1 cup of syrup in the pan.

  4. Return the pan to the stove and cook the remaining syrup until it thickens like candy.

Finish the icing

  1. Add the thickened syrup to the egg whites and beat until cool. Flavor as desired.

Simpler version

  1. For a simpler version, mix 1 cup of sugar with about 4 tablespoons of hot water to moisten. Boil until it forms a soft ball in water.

  2. Pour the syrup over the beaten white of 1 egg and beat until cool and stiff.

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Granulated sugar
Dissolved in water and boiled, sugar forms the syrup that sets the icing's sweet, glossy body.
Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that gives the icing its light, airy structure.

The step that matters

Cooking the syrup to the correct stage. Syrup that is undercooked stays too thin and the icing will not hold its shape, while overcooked syrup turns hard and grainy. Hot syrup poured slowly into the whites lets the foam cook and stiffen without collapsing.

“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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