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Dessert

Snow Souffle

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 whites of the eggs to a stiff froth.

  2. Dissolve more than half a box of gelatine in 1¼ cups of hot water.

  3. Add 2 cups of sugar and the juice of 2 lemons to the gelatine mixture and stir until dissolved and cooled.

Set and serve

  1. Gently fold the beaten egg whites into the cooled mixture until it is white and stiff.

  2. Mould the mixture and serve with soft 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. 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

Eggs
Whipped whites trap air, giving the light, foamy structure of the souffle.
Gelatine
Sets the liquid mixture into a firm, sliceable form as it cools.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the set mixture its body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that sharpens the sweetness and brightens the flavour.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Fold gently and only after the gelatine mixture has cooled. Hot or vigorous stirring deflates the whipped whites, and warm gelatine can collapse the foam before it sets.

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.

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