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Dessert

Snow Drifts

A gelatin dessert made with lemon, sugar, egg whites, and custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and milk 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 ↓

Snow Drifts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gelatine base

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in boiling water.

  2. Mix the lemon juice and sugar together, then add to the gelatine.

  3. Pour the mixture into a mold and let it cool until set but not cold.

Make the snow and assemble

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff, sweeten and flavor them, then float on boiling milk for about 1 minute.

  2. Place the mold in cold water to release the gelatine, then break it into bits with a fork.

  3. Add some of the broken gelatine and the beaten egg whites back into the mold, filling it with the remaining gelatine.

  4. Let it cool completely before serving on a dish surrounded by custard made from the egg yolks and 1 pint of milk.

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. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a wobbly, sliceable structure as it cools.
Egg whites
Whipped into stiff foam that gives the dessert its light, airy snow texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the dessert and balances the sharpness of the lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and cuts the sweetness.
Milk
Poached under the egg whites and used in the custard, adding richness and a soft, creamy flavor.

The step that matters

Let the gelatine cool until set but not cold. If the gelatine is too cold it sets firmly and will not bind well with the added pieces; if too warm it stays runny and the snow sinks and mixes in instead of floating in the mold.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, 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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