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Dessert

Snow Pudding

A chilled gelatin dessert flavored with lemon, made with egg whites and a custard topping.

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 Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gelatine

  1. Soak the gelatine in cold water for 10 minutes.

  2. Heat the gelatine on the stove, stirring until dissolved, then let it cool.

  3. Beat the cooled gelatine until frothy.

Make the pudding

  1. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until frothy.

  2. Combine the frothy gelatine, egg whites, sugar, and lemon flavoring.

  3. Wet small cups with water and fill them with the mixture.

  4. Refrigerate until cool and hardened.

Make the custard and serve

  1. Make a soft custard by cooking the egg yolks and pour it over the pudding when cold.

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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, wobbly structure as it cools.
Egg whites
Whipped to a foam, they add lightness and airy volume to the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps stabilise the whipped egg white foam.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard through gentle heat, giving it a smooth, pourable texture.

The step that matters

Heating the gelatine until dissolved. Gelatine must fully dissolve before cooling, or undissolved granules will leave gritty specks and uneven setting. It should cool to lukewarm before being beaten into the egg whites so it does not deflate the foam.

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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