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Dessert

Dish of Snowwhipped Cream

A chilled dessert of whipped cream flavored with sweet wine, sugar, and lemon or vanilla, served with jelly or jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Dish of Snowwhipped Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Beat the egg whites to a froth.

  2. Add the heavy cream, sweet wine, sugar, and extract to the egg whites, then whip the mixture to a froth.

Assemble and serve

  1. Serve in a glass dish with jelly or jam.

  2. Alternatively, layer ladyfingers or sliced sponge cake in a glass dish, top the layered cake with jelly or jam, and heap the whipped cream 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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

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

  5. Cream + winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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 into foam, they trap air and give the cream its light, airy structure.
Heavy cream
Adds fat and body, making the whipped topping richer and more stable.
Sweet wine
Adds sweetness and aroma to the whipped mixture.
Fine white sugar
Sweetens the mixture and helps stabilize the foam as it whips.

The step that matters

Whip the mixture to a froth. Whipping must be stopped at a soft, glossy froth. Overwhipping the egg whites and cream can break the foam structure, causing it to weep and collapse.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits about as well
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream, wine, 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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