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Dessert

Boiled Icing

A sugar icing made by boiling sugar and water, then folding in beaten egg white and flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Boiled Icing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar and water together until it forms threads when dipped by a spoon and dropped back into the kettle.

  2. Do not stir while boiling and keep the kettle covered to wash down the sides with steam.

Whip and finish

  1. Beat the egg white until light, adding the cream of tartar while beating.

  2. When the egg white is stiff and the syrup is ready, combine them by pouring the syrup onto the egg white while whipping briskly.

  3. Add the extract and beat until stiff enough to spread.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  3. Cream + eggtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Cream and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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
Dissolves into the syrup and provides sweetness and the body of the icing.
Egg white
Whipped into a foam that gives the icing its light, airy structure.
Cream of tartar
Stabilises the whipped egg white, helping it hold its volume.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be boiled into a syrup.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot syrup into the egg white. The syrup must be at the thread stage and poured slowly while whipping briskly; this cooks the egg white gently and builds a stable, glossy foam instead of a runny or collapsed one.

“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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