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Dessert

Snow Pudding

A gelatin dessert made with gelatine, sugar, lemon, eggs, milk, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and sherry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,479 recipes. Both carry 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine, which smells cocoa, roasted. The science ↓

Snow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the snow

  1. Soak the gelatine in cold water until soft.

  2. Add boiling water, lemon juice, and beaten egg whites to the gelatine mixture.

  3. Beat until very light and pour into a glass dish.

Make the custard and serve

  1. For the custard, boil the milk with the egg yolks and lemon rind.

  2. Stir in a few spoonfuls of sherry and pour over the pudding.

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 + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,479 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

  2. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + sherrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid so the whipped egg white holds its light, airy shape.
Egg whites
Whipped to a foam, they create the light, airy structure of the snow.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps stabilise the whipped egg white foam.
Egg yolks
Thicken the milk into a custard when gently heated, adding richness.
Milk
Forms the base of the custard, adding creaminess and body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sweet pudding.

The step that matters

Beat until very light. The egg whites must be beaten enough to trap air in a stable foam; underbeaten whites stay dense and the pudding loses its light, snowy texture.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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