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Dessert

Snow Pudding

A gelatin dessert made with gelatine, sugar, lemon juice, egg whites, and a custard of milk, corn starch, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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. Dissolve the gelatine in boiling water.

  2. When nearly cool, add sugar and lemon juice.

  3. Strain the mixture.

  4. Add beaten egg whites.

  5. Beat all thoroughly.

  6. Pour into a mould.

Make the custard and serve

  1. Stir corn starch into boiling milk.

  2. Beat the egg yolks.

  3. Mix the yolks with the milk.

  4. Serve the pudding with the soft custard.

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. Lemon + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid mixture into a firm, wobbly structure as it cools.
Egg whites
Beaten into the mixture to add lightness and airy texture.
Egg yolks
Thicken the milk into a soft custard.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk so the custard becomes smooth and pourable.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the lemon juice.

The step that matters

Add the egg whites to the nearly cool mixture. If the gelatine mixture is still too hot, the beaten egg whites will deflate and lose their foam. If it has cooled and thickened too far, it will not blend evenly. Timing the addition while it is nearly cool keeps the whites airy and the pudding light.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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