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Dessert

Snow Pudding

A gelatin dessert made with lemon, sugar, egg whites, and custard of yolks, sugar, milk, and vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Snow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in boiling water.

  2. Strain and let it cool, then add the lemon juice and 2 cups of sugar.

  3. Beat the whites of 4 eggs until stiff and fold into the mixture.

  4. Pour into a mold and refrigerate until set.

Make the custard and serve

  1. For the custard, combine the yolks of 4 eggs, 1 cup of sugar, and 1 pint of milk in a saucepan.

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

  3. Add vanilla to flavor.

  4. Serve the custard around the set pudding.

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 + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,961 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, wobbly structure as it cools.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff foam, they lighten the pudding and give it its snowy texture.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they cook gently with the milk.
Sugar
Sweetens both the pudding and the custard.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the pudding.

The step that matters

Cook the custard over low heat. Egg yolks thicken gently at low heat while stirring constantly. Too much heat or too little stirring can scramble the yolks, leaving lumps instead of a smooth custard.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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