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Dessert

Orange Snow

A chilled gelatin dessert made with orange juice, lemon juice, grated orange rind, sugar syrup, and beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Snow

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the gelatine in ½ pint of water until soft.

  2. Squeeze the juice from the lemon and oranges, and strain it.

  3. Grate the rind of the oranges.

Make the mixture

  1. Make a syrup by boiling 1 lb of sugar with 3 quarts of water until dissolved.

  2. Combine the syrup with the orange juice and grated rind.

  3. Cool the mixture in ice water, then pour it into a freezer.

Freeze and serve

  1. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks and stir them into the mixture while freezing.

  2. Once frozen hard, re-pack with ice and cover until ready to serve.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  4. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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 to stiff peaks, they add a light, airy texture to the frozen mixture.
Gelatine
Softened in water, it helps give the dessert a set, smooth body.
Sugar
Dissolved into syrup, it sweetens the dessert and softens its frozen texture.
Orange juice
Provides the main orange flavour and liquid base of the dessert.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks and stir them into the mixture while freezing. Egg whites trap air when whipped, but they must be stiff and folded in while the mixture is still partly liquid so the air stays distributed and the texture stays light rather than dense or icy.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Orangethe original
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Raisinfits less well

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