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Dessert

Snow Pudding

A light, airy pudding made with corn starch, egg whites, sugar, milk, and butter, served with a sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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

Make 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 beaten egg whites into the mixture with a pinch of salt and a little sugar.

  5. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish and steam for 15 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Beat the egg yolks and mix them with sugar, milk, and butter.

  2. Boil the sauce mixture 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. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

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 water as its granules swell, giving the pudding a soft, set body.
Egg whites
Whipped into foam, they add lightness and help the pudding hold its airy structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to both the pudding and the sauce.
Milk
Gives the sauce moisture and a creamy, mellow body.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and smooth flavour in the sauce.

The step that matters

Fold the beaten egg whites into the mixture. Whipped egg whites trap air in a foam that makes the pudding light. Stirring hard or folding roughly deflates that foam, so the pudding turns dense instead of airy.

Swap the walnut

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

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

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

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