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Dessert

Snow Jelly

A gelatin dessert made with sugar, brandy, lemon juice, nutmeg, cinnamon, and egg yolks and whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Snow Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the gelatine in ½ cup of cold water for 1 hour.

  2. Heat the remaining water in a saucepan until tepid, then remove from heat.

  3. Add the soaked gelatine, sugar, nutmeg, lemon juice, cinnamon, and brandy to the saucepan.

  4. Whip the egg yolks and whites in a bowl.

  5. Add 1 tablespoon of cold water to the egg mixture and mix.

  6. Pour the egg mixture into the saucepan.

  7. If the eggshells are clean, add them to the saucepan.

Cook

  1. Return the saucepan to the heat.

  2. Stir rapidly with a whisk until the mixture boils.

  3. Remove the whisk.

  4. Let the mixture boil for 2 minutes.

  5. Remove the saucepan from heat.

Set

  1. Cool the mixture until it is not set.

  2. Pour the mixture into a cold water-dipped mold.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Brandy + cinnamontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,199 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 jelly as it cools.
Egg whites
Whipped to add airy lightness and help give the jelly its snowy look.
Egg yolks
Enrich the mixture and add body and richness when cooked gently.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and balances the lemon's acidity.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sugar.

The step that matters

Stir rapidly with a whisk until the mixture boils. Constant stirring keeps the egg proteins from sticking and clumping on the bottom of the pan, and the mixture must be brought to a boil to cook the egg and clarify the liquid.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy, egg, nutmeg, cinnamon. 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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