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Dessert

Snow Drift

A dessert of stewed apples folded into beaten eggs and milk, served chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,104 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Snow Drift

Ingredients

Directions

Make the apple snow

  1. Stew the apples and rub them through a colander; let cool.

  2. Add the beaten egg whites, lemon juice, lemon rind, and sugar; beat until frothy.

  3. Spoon the mixture into a glass dish.

Make the custard and serve

  1. Beat the egg yolks with the sugar.

  2. Boil the milk, then stir in the beaten yolks.

  3. Serve the milk mixture with the apple mixture.

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. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  4. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

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

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Apples
Provide the fruit pulp that forms the base of the apple snow.
Egg whites
Beaten into foam, they lighten the apple mixture and give it its snowy texture.
Egg yolks
Thicken the warm milk into a custard when stirred in.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that is served with the apple mixture.
Sugar
Sweetens both the apple mixture and the egg yolks.

The step that matters

Stir the beaten yolks into the boiling milk. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently, but if they are added to very hot milk without being stirred constantly they can scramble into lumps. Stirring steadily while the yolks are added keeps the custard smooth.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, lemon, 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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