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Dessert

Snowball Custard

A custard made with egg whites folded into boiling milk, sweetened with egg yolks and sugar, finished with lemon flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Snowball Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the snowballs

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  2. Add the beaten egg whites to the boiling milk using a tablespoon, dipping them in as they rise.

  3. Turn the egg whites in the milk until cooked, then place them in a pudding dish.

Make the custard

  1. In the same milk, stir in the sweetened egg yolks until the mixture thickens.

  2. Remove from heat and add lemon flavoring.

  3. Pour the custard into a dish and place the cooked egg whites on top.

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 + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

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

Egg whites
Whipped to stiff foam, they set into light, airy snowballs when poached in milk.
Egg yolks
Thicken the warm milk into a custard as they set with gentle heat.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that the yolks thicken.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks. Yolks thicken as their proteins set with gentle heat. If the milk is too hot or stirred poorly, the yolks can scramble into lumps instead of forming a smooth custard.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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