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Dessert

Snow Pudding

A chilled pudding made from boiled water, corn starch, sugar, eggs, and milk, served with a thickened sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Snow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Bring 1 pint of water to a boil in a pot.

  2. Stir in 1 tablespoon of corn starch, 1 tablespoon of sugar, and a pinch of salt.

  3. Add the stiffly beaten whites of 2 eggs to the boiling mixture.

  4. Pour the mixture into a mold and let it cool.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine 1-2 pint of milk, 2 egg yolks, 1-2 cup of sugar, and 1 teaspoon of corn starch in a saucepan.

  2. Cook the sauce over medium heat until thickened.

  3. Flavor the sauce to taste.

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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Corn + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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 the hot mixture to give the pudding its light, airy, foamy structure.
Corn starch
Thickens the liquid as it heats, giving the pudding body and the sauce its smooth consistency.
Egg yolks
Thicken and enrich the sauce, giving it a smooth, custard-like texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, adding richness and body.

The step that matters

Add the stiffly beaten egg whites to the boiling mixture. Whites that are not beaten stiff will not hold air, so the pudding stays dense instead of light and foamy. Egg whites also set when heated, which gives the pudding its shape.

“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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