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Dessert

Guava Snow with Custard Sauce

A chilled dessert of guava pulp mixed with a thickened starch mixture, topped with a custard 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 ↓

Guava Snow with Custard Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the guava snow

  1. Boil the sugar and boiling water together.

  2. Dissolve the corn starch in cold water and add it to the boiling mixture, stirring constantly until it thickens.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in the guava pulp.

  4. Beat the mixture into the stiffly whipped egg whites.

  5. Heap the mixture into a glass serving dish and place on ice.

Make the custard sauce and serve

  1. For the custard sauce, heat the milk and add the sugar and beaten egg yolks.

  2. Steam the mixture until it coats a knife blade, but do not boil.

  3. Pour the custard sauce around the guava snow when serving.

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Guava + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

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

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

Corn starch
Thickens the boiled sugar syrup into a stable, spoonable base.
Egg whites
Whipped into foam, they give the guava snow its light, airy structure.
Guava pulp
Supplies the main fruit flavour and body of the snow.
Egg yolks
Thicken the milk as they set gently, giving the custard sauce its body.
Milk
Forms the creamy base of the custard sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the snow and the custard sauce, and helps stabilise the syrup.

The step that matters

Steaming the custard sauce without boiling. Egg yolks thicken as they warm, but overheating makes them curdle and turn grainy. Stop when the custard coats a knife blade and never let it boil.

Swap the guava

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Guavathe original

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