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Dessert

Orange Snow

A chilled gelatin dessert made with orange juice, lemon, powdered sugar, and whipped egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Snow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Soak the gelatine in cold water for 10 minutes.

  2. Juice the oranges and lemon, and grate the peel of one orange.

  3. Mix the fruit juice and peel with the soaked gelatine, then add the powdered sugar and stir well.

  4. Let the mixture stand for 1 hour.

Dissolve and strain

  1. Pour in the boiling water and stir until clear.

  2. Strain through a coarse cloth, pressing hard to extract all liquid.

Set and serve

  1. Once cold, gradually fold in the whipped egg whites until thick and white.

  2. Pour into a wet mold and refrigerate for 8 hours.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

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

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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 and folded in to give the set dessert a light, airy, foamy texture.
Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable structure as it cools.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the juice and dissolves easily into the cold mixture.
Sweet oranges
Supply the main juice and fragrant peel that flavour the dish.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. The mixture must be cold but still liquid before folding. If it is warm, the whites deflate; if it has already set, they will not blend in evenly, and the light texture is lost.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Orangethe original
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Raisinfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, 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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