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Dessert

Snow Eggs

A dessert of boiled milk with folded egg whites and vanilla cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg 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 ↓

Snow Eggs

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meringue

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Whisk the egg whites until stiff, then gradually add the sugar.

Poach and serve

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the egg whites, about the size of a small egg, into the boiling milk.

  2. Let them cook for 5 to 6 minutes, then remove with a skimmer and place on a dish.

  3. Prepare a vanilla cream with the remaining milk and pour it over the eggs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Whites of eggs
Whisked into a foam that holds its shape and sets into soft, airy puffs when heated.
Sugar
Sweetens the whites and stabilizes the foam so it holds up during whisking and poaching.
Milk
Serves as the poaching liquid and the base of the vanilla cream that is poured over the eggs.

The step that matters

Poach for 5 to 6 minutes. Egg white proteins set when heated. Cooking too long or at a hard boil toughens and shrinks the puffs, while too short a time leaves them raw and runny inside.

“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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