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Dessert

Snow Pudding

A light, steamed pudding made with corn starch, eggs, sugar, milk, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Snow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Dissolve corn starch in a little cold water.

  2. Pour boiling water over the dissolved corn starch and stir.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg whites and steam for 10 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, combine egg yolks, sugar, milk, and butter in a saucepan.

  2. Boil the sauce and add flavoring as desired.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Corn + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together349 recipes

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

  3. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Corn starch
Thickens the boiling water into a soft, set pudding structure.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in to lighten the pudding and give it its snowy, airy texture.
Egg yolks
Enrich the sauce and help it thicken into a smooth, custard-like texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, adding richness and body.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother mouthfeel in the sauce.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Egg whites hold air only when beaten to a stable foam and folded in gently. Overmixing or deflating them makes the pudding dense rather than light, so fold rather than stir.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pecansfits about as well
  3. Peanutfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

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