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Dessert

Snow Pudding

A chilled custard dessert made with egg whites, egg yolks, sugar, butter, milk, and flavored with lemon or vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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

Prepare

  1. Moisten corn starch in a little cold water.

  2. Beat egg whites until stiff.

  3. Set a pail in hot water.

  4. Wet cups in cold water to help the pudding release easily.

Make the pudding

  1. Cook for 10 minutes, stirring often.

  2. Divide the mixture equally.

  3. Set on ice for up to 2 days.

Make the custard

  1. Beat egg yolks with sugar and butter in a quart measure.

  2. Add milk.

  3. Cook in hot water until thickened but not curdled.

  4. Flavor with lemon or vanilla.

Serve

  1. Pour custard around the pudding.

  2. Serve.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Corn starch
Thickens the mixture so the pudding sets firm when cooled.
Egg whites
Beaten to stiffness, they give the pudding its light, airy structure.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it thicken gently into a smooth sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and pudding.
Milk
Adds moisture and body to the custard.

The step that matters

Cook the custard gently until thickened but not curdled. Egg yolks scramble and curdle if the heat is too high or the custard cooks too fast. Gentle heat in hot water lets the proteins thicken it smoothly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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