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Dessert

Apple Snow

Apple Snow is a dessert made from steamed apple pulp folded into stiff egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Snow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Pare, quarter, and core 4 sour apples.

  2. Steam the apples until soft.

  3. Rub the steamed apples through a sieve to obtain ½ cup of apple pulp.

Make and serve the snow

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  2. Gradually add the sweetened apple pulp to the egg whites.

  3. Pile the mixture lightly on a dish and serve with custard sauce. Optionally, add lemon juice.

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. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  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. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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 stiff foam that gives the dessert its light, airy structure.
Apple pulp
Supplies the fruit flavour and body, folded into the foam to make it smooth and soft.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the apple pulp so the finished snow tastes balanced.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites until stiff. Egg whites hold air only when fully whipped and free of grease or yolk. Under-beaten whites collapse when the apple pulp is folded in, leaving a dense, watery dessert.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, egg, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, 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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