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Dessert

Another Boiled Icing

A boiled icing made by cooking sugar and water, then mixing with beaten egg whites and beating for an hour.

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

Another Boiled Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, combine 1½ pounds of sugar and 1 pint of water.

  2. Cook over medium heat until the mixture ropes.

Make the icing

  1. In a separate bowl, beat 7 egg whites until well beaten.

  2. Slowly stir the warm sugar mixture into the egg whites.

  3. Beat the mixture hard for one hour.

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

Sugar
Dissolves into the water to form a syrup that sets into a sweet, glossy icing.
Egg whites
Whipped to foam, they trap air and give the icing its light, airy structure.

The step that matters

Cook the syrup until it ropes. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration before it meets the egg whites. Underheated syrup stays thin and makes a loose icing, while overcooked syrup turns hard and grainy when beaten in.

“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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