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Dessert

Snow Pudding

A chilled dessert made from boiled water, sugar, corn starch, egg whites, and flavoring, served with cream and optional fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Snow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the water, sugar, and corn starch together briskly for 5 minutes.

  2. Remove from heat, then beat in the stiffly whipped egg whites.

  3. Add flavoring to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve cold with cream and optional fruits or jelly cubes.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Corn + orangetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together586 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + corntop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Egg whites
Whipped into the hot mixture to give the pudding its light, airy, foamy texture.
Corn starch
Thickens the boiled water and sugar into a set, smooth base.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps stabilise the thickened mixture.

The step that matters

Beat in the whipped egg whites after removing from heat. Hot starch mixtures thicken as they cool; adding stiffly whipped whites off the heat keeps them from deflating or cooking into lumps, so the pudding stays light and airy.

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, corn, egg, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Orangethe original

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