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Dessert

Snow Souffle

A light, gelatine-based dessert made with stiffened egg whites, sugar, lemon juice, and served with soft custard.

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 Souffle

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Beat the egg whites to a stiff froth.

  2. Dissolve the gelatine in hot water.

  3. Add sugar and lemon juice to the gelatine mixture and stir until dissolved and cooled.

  4. Gently fold the beaten egg whites into the gelatine mixture until white and stiff.

Mold and serve

  1. Mold the mixture and serve with soft custard poured around it.

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

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

  3. Egg + sugartop 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

Egg whites
Beaten into a foam that traps air, giving the souffle its light, airy structure.
Gelatine
Sets the mixture as it cools, so it holds its molded shape.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps stabilise the foam when beaten into it.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Gently fold the beaten egg whites into the gelatine mixture. The air bubbles in the beaten whites give the souffle its lightness. Stirring vigorously pops those bubbles and deflates the mixture, so fold slowly with a spatula until just combined.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, 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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