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Dessert

Snow Drift

A chilled dessert made from milk, isinglass, sugar, lemon juice, egg whites, and custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Snow Drift

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the isinglass

  1. Soak the isinglass in a quart of cold water for 2 hours or overnight, weighted down.

  2. Remove the isinglass from the water and pour 1 pint of boiling water over it.

Make the snow

  1. Add the crushed sugar and lemon juice to the mixture.

  2. Place the mixture on ice until it begins to thicken.

  3. Beat the 4 egg whites to stiff peaks and fold them into the mixture.

  4. Pour the mixture into cold water-wetted molds and place them on ice.

Serve

  1. Serve with a boiled custard made from the 4 egg yolks, 1 additional egg, and the milk.

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 + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Isinglass
Gelatin-like protein that sets the liquid into a firm, wobbly structure as it chills.
Egg whites
Beaten to stiff peaks, they trap air and give the dessert its light, airy texture.
Crushed sugar
Adds sweetness and helps stabilise the whipped structure.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Milk
Forms the base of the boiled custard served alongside the dessert.

The step that matters

Folding the egg whites into the mixture. Once the mixture has begun to thicken on ice, the whites must be beaten to stiff peaks and folded in gently. Overmixing knocks out the trapped air, so the dessert turns dense instead of light.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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