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Dessert

Snowball Custard

A custard made by folding beaten egg whites into boiling milk, thickened with sweetened egg yolks and flavored.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Snowball Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the floating islands

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  2. Drop the beaten egg whites into the boiling milk by tablespoonfuls. Turn the egg whites as they rise.

  3. Cook until done, then place in a dish.

Make the custard

  1. Add the sweetened egg yolks to the milk.

  2. Stir until it thickens.

  3. Remove from heat.

  4. Add your chosen flavoring.

  5. Pour the custard into a glass dish.

  6. Lay the cooked egg whites on top.

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. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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

Egg whites
Whipped to stiff foam that cooks into light, airy floating islands.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and poaches the egg whites.
Egg yolks
Thicken the milk into custard as they cook and set.

The step that matters

Stirring the custard until it thickens. Egg yolks thicken milk only up to a point. Heating too hard or too long can curdle the custard, so it should be removed from heat once it coats a spoon.

“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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