Skip to main content
Dessert

Snow Souffle

A chilled gelatin dessert made with egg whites, sugar, lemon juice, and served with soft custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Snow Souffle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Beat the egg whites to a stiff froth.

  2. Dissolve the gelatine in a little more than 1 pint of hot water.

  3. Add the sugar and lemon juice to the gelatine mixture and let it cool.

Whip and set

  1. Stir the beaten egg whites into the cooled mixture and beat until white and stiff.

  2. Mould the mixture and pour soft custard around it before serving.

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

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

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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 foam, they trap air and give the soufflé its light, airy texture.
Gelatine
Sets the liquid mixture so it holds its shape when moulded.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps stabilise the whipped foam.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and brightens the flavour.

The step that matters

Let the gelatine mixture cool before adding the egg whites. Gelatine begins to set as it cools, and if it is still hot the egg white foam will collapse and lose air. If it is too cold it may set in lumps before the whites are folded in. Cooling until it is just thickening keeps the foam stable.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes