Skip to main content
Dessert

Snow Pudding

A steamed pudding made with corn starch, egg whites, sugar, milk, butter, and a sauce of egg yolks, sugar, milk, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Snow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pudding

  1. Dissolve the corn starch in a little cold water.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the dissolved corn starch.

  3. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  4. Fold the stiff egg whites into the mixture with a pinch of salt and a little sugar.

  5. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish.

  6. Steam for 15 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Beat the egg yolks.

  2. Add the sugar, milk, and butter to the yolks.

  3. Boil the sauce until it thickens.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Corn + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together349 recipes

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

  3. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

  5. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Corn starch
Thickens the hot liquid as it cooks, giving the pudding its soft, set body.
Egg whites
Whipped into foam, they lighten the pudding and give it an airy texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to both the pudding and the sauce.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness to the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat, richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the sauce.

The step that matters

Folding the stiff egg whites. Fold gently so the air whipped into the egg whites is kept. Stirring or beating deflates the foam, and the pudding then steams up dense instead of light and airy.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pecansfits about as well
  3. Peanutfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

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

More snow pudding recipes

Egg 5Sauce 3 See all 260 →

You might also like

Corn CakeCorn Cake90 recipesCorn Starch CakeCorn Starch Cake89 recipesCorn CakesCorn Cakes22 recipesGreen Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding14 recipes