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Dessert

Snow Pudding

A light, sweet pudding made with cornstarch, egg whites, and milk, topped with a sugar‑flavored sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,147 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Snow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Dissolve cornstarch in a little cold water.

  2. Add the dissolved cornstarch to boiling water and stir until thickened.

  3. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites, sugar, salt, and flavoring.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, combine milk, egg yolks, whole egg, sugar, salt, and flavoring in a saucepan.

  2. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly until thickened.

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 + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Milk + saucetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Cornstarch
Thickens the boiling water into a soft, set pudding base.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they give the pudding its light, airy texture.
Egg yolks
Thicken and enrich the sauce as they cook gently with the milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, adding richness and body.
Sugar
Sweetens both the pudding and the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the sauce over low heat, stirring constantly. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently, but too much heat or too little stirring can scramble them. Constant stirring keeps the custard smooth and evenly thickened.

“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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