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Dessert

Frosting Without Eggs

A simple frosting made by boiling sugar and milk, then cooling and stirring until spreadable, optionally flavored and mixed with nuts or dried fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and nuts work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 982 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Frosting Without Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the syrup

  1. Combine sugar and milk in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Do not stir once it begins to boil; let it boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Remove from heat and add flavoring.

Cool and finish

  1. Stir the mixture over a bowl of cold water until it reaches a spreadable consistency.

  2. Optionally, mix in chopped nuts, dates, or figs.

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. Milk + nutstop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together982 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

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

  3. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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, as it crystallizes during stirring, the thick, spreadable body.
Milk
Adds moisture and creaminess, dissolving the sugar to form a smooth syrup.

The step that matters

Stirring over cold water until spreadable. Stirring while the boiled syrup cools makes sugar form many small crystals, which gives a creamy, spreadable texture. Stirring too early or too long can make it stiff and grainy, so watch for the point where it thickens and loses its gloss.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, milk):

  1. Cocoafits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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