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Dessert

Boiled Frosting

A frosting made by boiling sugar and water, then pouring onto beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Boiled Frosting

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 ↓

Boiled Frosting

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the frosting

  1. Boil the sugar and water until the syrup threads.

  2. Pour the syrup in a fine stream onto the beaten egg whites until foamy.

  3. Beat the mixture until cool while standing in a dish of water.

Finish the cake

  1. Pour the frosting over the cake, spread evenly, and decorate as desired.

  2. Serve immediately.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

Granulated sugar
Dissolves into the water to form the syrup that sweetens and thickens the frosting.
Egg whites
Beaten into a foam that gives the frosting its light, airy structure.

The step that matters

Pouring the syrup into the egg whites. Hot syrup cooks the egg white proteins as it is beaten in, setting a stable, glossy foam. Pouring in a fine stream lets it blend in without scrambling the whites or deflating the foam.

“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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