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Dessert

Snow Pudding

A pudding made from corn starch, water, sugar, egg whites, and milk, served with a sauce of egg yolks, milk, sugar, butter, and corn starch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Snow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Dissolve corn starch in a little cold water.

  2. Pour boiling water over the corn starch mixture.

  3. Add sugar and salt.

  4. Stir in the beaten egg whites thoroughly, then remove from heat and flavor slightly.

Steam and cool

  1. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish.

  2. Steam for 15 minutes.

  3. Set aside to cool.

Make the sauce

  1. Blend egg yolks, milk, sugar, butter, and corn starch with cold water.

  2. Boil the sauce until it thickens.

Serve

  1. Serve the pudding cold with the sauce flavored with lemon or vanilla.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Corn starch
Thickens the pudding and the sauce as it heats in liquid.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in, they set with heat to give the pudding a light, airy structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to both the pudding and the sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and adds richness.
Butter
Adds fat to the sauce, contributing richness and smooth mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce until it thickens. Corn starch only reaches full thickening once the liquid boils, so a sauce that is not brought to a full boil stays thin. Stirring during heating keeps the starch dispersed and prevents lumps.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, sugar, egg, milk, sauce, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, sugar, egg, milk, sauce, butter. 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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