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Dessert

Marshmallow Nut Icing

A sweet icing made from sugar syrup, melted marshmallows, egg white, nuts, and vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nuts and vanilla 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 ↓

Marshmallow Nut Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the icing

  1. Boil sugar and water until it forms a hard ball when dropped in water.

  2. Melt marshmallows in a double boiler until they run together.

  3. Combine the boiled syrup with melted marshmallows, whipping the mixture while still hot.

  4. Finally, whip in the well-beaten egg white, nuts, and vanilla.

Finish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sugar
Forms the syrup base that gives the icing its sweetness and body.
Marshmallows
Melt smooth and add sweetness and a soft, airy structure to the icing.
Egg white
Whipped to foam, it lightens the icing and helps it hold its shape.
Nuts
Add crunch and texture against the soft, glossy icing.

The step that matters

Boil the sugar and water to a hard ball. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration to set firmly once cooled. Undercooked syrup leaves the icing soft and runny, while overcooking makes it hard and brittle.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg, vanilla):

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

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