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Dessert

Sea Foam

Sea Foam is a dessert made with water, corn starch, egg whites, and sweetened whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42,166 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

Sea Foam

Ingredients

Directions

Make the foam

  1. Boil the water in a pot.

  2. Dissolve the corn starch in a little cold water and add it to the boiling water.

  3. Cook until the mixture is clear.

  4. Stir in the beaten egg whites and flavor as desired.

Serve

  1. Let it cool and serve with sweetened whipped cream.

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. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  2. Corn + creamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Corn + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,484 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Corn starch
Thickens the boiling water into a light, set mass as its starch granules swell and gelatinize.
Egg whites
Trap air when beaten, giving the dessert its light, foamy structure.

The step that matters

Stir in the beaten egg whites. The mixture must be hot enough to lightly set the egg whites, but stirred gently so the trapped air is not knocked out. Overstirring or adding them to a mixture that has cooled too much can leave the foam dense or loose.

“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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