Skip to main content
Dessert

Snow Cheese

A chilled almond-based dessert made with ratafia, rose water, cream, lemon juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Snow Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the almond paste

  1. Blanch the almonds and pound them in a mortar.

  2. Add the ratafia and rose water to the almond paste.

Make the cream mixture

  1. Stir the paste into the thick cream.

  2. Add the strained lemon juice and sweeten with white sugar.

  3. Whisk the mixture until it begins to thicken.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a mold and set it in a cool place.

  2. After 12 hours, turn it out to serve.

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. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Almond + rosetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,465 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Rose + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Almond + creamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sweet almonds
Pounded into a paste that gives the cheese its body and nutty flavour.
Thick cream
Provides richness and fat, giving the set cheese a smooth, creamy texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that thickens the cream and brightens its flavour.
White sugar
Sweetens the mixture and balances the acidity of the lemon juice.
Rose water
Adds a delicate floral aroma to the cheese.

The step that matters

Whisk the mixture until it begins to thicken. Whisking incorporates air and begins to thicken the cream before setting. Stopping at the right point matters, since over-whisking cream can turn it grainy or split it into butter and liquid.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, rose, cream, 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes