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Dessert

Apple Snow

Apple Snow is a dessert of cooked apples mixed with frothy egg whites and sugar, served with currant jelly and thick cream.

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

Apple Snow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the apples and flavor them with a little lemon juice.

  2. Cook the apples until they are reduced to a pulp and let them cool.

Make the snow

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

  2. Stir the beaten egg whites and sifted sugar into the cooled apple pulp until the mixture begins to stiffen.

Serve

  1. Heap the mixture into a glass dish or serve in custard cups.

  2. Garnish with spots of red currant jelly and serve with thick cream.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + red curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Apple + red curranttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together111 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

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

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

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

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

Apples
Cook down into a pulp that forms the base of the dish.
Egg whites
Whipped to foam, they lighten the mixture and give it its snowy, airy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the pulp and helps stabilize the whipped foam.
Thick cream
Adds richness and fat that contrasts with the light, tart apple foam.

The step that matters

Stirring in the beaten egg whites. Fold gently and stop once the mixture just begins to stiffen. Overmixing knocks air out of the whites, so the snow turns dense and loses its lightness.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Blackberryfits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, lemon, sugar, egg, cream. 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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