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Dessert

Snow Ice

A frozen dessert made from gelatin, sugar, lemon juice, egg whites, and a custard topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gelatine base

  1. Soak the gelatine in ½ cup warm water for 30 minutes.

  2. Pour 1 pint of boiling water over the soaked gelatine and stir until dissolved.

  3. Add 1 pint of cold water, lemon juice, and sugar to the gelatine mixture.

  4. Freeze the mixture until nearly solid, then fold in the beaten egg whites.

Make the custard

  1. For the custard, scald 1 pint of milk with ½ cup sugar, but do not let it boil.

  2. Once cooled, flavor the custard with vanilla extract.

Serve

  1. Serve the frozen mixture with custard poured around it.

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, sliceable body as it chills and freezes.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in, they add lightness and a foamy, airy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and softens the texture of the frozen mixture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the base.
Milk
Forms the richer custard that is served alongside the frozen mixture.

The step that matters

Freeze until nearly solid, then fold in the egg whites. If the mixture is frozen too hard, it cannot be folded smoothly, and the beaten whites will deflate. Stopping while it is still slushy keeps the foam light.

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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