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Dessert

Guava Snow with Custard Sauce

A chilled guava dessert thickened with cornstarch and topped with a steamed custard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,147 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Guava Snow with Custard Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the guava base

  1. Boil sugar and boiling water together.

  2. Dissolve cornstarch in cold water and add to the boiling mixture, stirring constantly until it thickens.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in guava pulp.

  4. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the guava mixture.

  5. Heap the mixture into a glass serving dish and place on ice.

Make the custard sauce

  1. For the custard sauce, heat milk and sugar in a saucepan.

  2. Whisk in the beaten egg yolks and steam the mixture until it coats a knife blade, without boiling.

Serve

  1. Pour the custard sauce around the guava snow when serving.

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 + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Guava + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

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

  4. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and milk 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

Cornstarch
Thickens the boiling guava mixture into a soft, set base.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they give the guava snow its light, airy texture.
Guava pulp
Provides the main flavour and aroma of the dessert.
Egg yolks
Thicken the milk custard sauce as they gently set with heat.
Sugar
Sweetens both the guava base and the custard sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard sauce without boiling. Egg yolks scramble if the custard gets too hot. Heating gently until it coats a knife blade lets the yolks thicken it smoothly instead of curdling.

Swap the guava

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Guavathe original

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