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Dessert

Snow Pudding

A chilled gelatin dessert made with egg whites, lemon juice, sugar, milk, and egg yolks, served with a custard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Gelatin and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,778 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Snow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Dissolve the gelatin in ½ cup cold water for about 1 hour.

  2. Fill the cup with boiling water to dissolve thoroughly.

  3. In a large bowl, combine the egg whites, lemon juice, sugar, and dissolved gelatin.

  4. Beat for 30 minutes.

  5. If it becomes too stiff, add a little water.

  6. Pour the mixture into a mold and refrigerate.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, scald the milk.

  2. Add the sugar and egg yolks, stirring until thickened like a custard.

  3. Serve the pudding with the sauce, both chilled.

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. Gelatin + sugartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,778 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

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

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

  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).

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

Gelatin
Sets the liquid mixture into a firm, sliceable pudding as it cools.
Egg whites
Beaten into foam, they give the pudding its light, airy, snowy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps stabilize the whipped egg white foam.
Milk
Forms the base of the custard sauce that is served with the pudding.
Egg yolks
Thicken the warm milk into a custard sauce as they set with gentle heat.

The step that matters

Stiffening the custard sauce. Egg yolks thicken milk only when heated gently; overheating can curdle them. Stir constantly and stop once the sauce coats a spoon like custard.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against gelatin, egg, sugar, 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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