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Dessert

Seafoam Icing

A light, airy icing made from sugar syrup and beaten egg whites, flavored with vanilla and optionally studded with nuts and raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Vanilla and nuts work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 638 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Seafoam Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar and hot water until it threads.

Whip the whites

  1. Beat the egg whites until very stiff.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of granulated sugar to the egg whites and beat until smooth.

Combine and finish

  1. Pour the syrup over the egg whites little by little.

  2. Flavor with vanilla.

  3. If desired, stir in 1 cup of nuts and raisins.

  4. Spread the icing on the cake.

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. Vanilla + nutstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together638 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  3. Nuts + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Vanilla + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together782 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

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
Sweetens the icing and, boiled with water, forms the syrup that gives it body.
Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that gives the icing its light, airy structure.
Hot water
Dissolves the sugar to make the syrup that is poured into the whipped whites.

The step that matters

Pour the syrup over the egg whites little by little. Adding hot syrup slowly lets it blend into the whipped foam without deflating it. Pouring it all at once can collapse the foam and leave the icing dense and runny.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, vanilla, raisin. 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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