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Dessert

Snow Pudding

A chilled gelatin dessert made with lemon juice, sugar, egg whites, and a custard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Snow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gelatine

  1. Soak the gelatine in cold water until soft.

  2. Add boiling water to the gelatine and stir until dissolved.

Whip the egg whites

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  2. Add sugar and beat together.

Chill and thicken

  1. Mix lemon juice and water into the gelatine.

  2. Let it cool.

  3. Set the bowl in a pan of ice water.

  4. When it thickens, beat until light.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

  6. Beat until thickened.

Set and serve

  1. Pour into a glass dish and refrigerate to harden.

  2. Serve with custard sauce made from egg yolks, sugar, milk, vanilla, and salt.

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

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

  2. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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 into a firm, sliceable structure as it cools.
Egg whites
Whipped to a foam that gives the pudding its light, airy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps stabilise the whipped egg whites.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Fold the whites in at the right thickness. The mixture should thicken to a soft, mounding state before the whites are folded in. If it is still runny, the foam deflates and the pudding loses its lightness; if it has set too firm, the whites will not blend in evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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