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Dessert

Vanilla Snow

A sweet rice pudding flavored with vanilla, topped with jelly and served with cream and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Vanilla Snow

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Cook the rice in a covered dish until nearly done to keep it white.

Make the pudding

  1. Add the cream, salt, beaten egg whites, and sugar to the rice, then flavor with vanilla.

  2. Pile the mixture in a glass dish and dot with jelly.

Serve

  1. Serve with cream and sugar.

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. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Rice + vanillatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,352 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Cream + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Rice
Forms the body of the pudding as its starch softens and thickens during cooking.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, giving the pudding a soft, creamy texture.
Egg whites
Add structure and help the mixture set and hold its shape.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the pudding tender.
Vanilla extract
Adds aroma and a warm, familiar flavor.

The step that matters

Cook the rice covered until nearly done. Rice keeps cooking from residual heat, and overcooking makes it mushy. A covered dish traps steam so the grains stay moist and pale rather than drying and yellowing.

“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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