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Dessert

Snow Pudding

A chilled milk and breadcrumb pudding flavored with lemon rind and sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Snow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a saucepan, heat the milk until warm.

  2. Add the breadcrumbs and grated lemon rind, stirring to combine.

  3. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks and then mix them into the milk mixture.

  4. Melt the butter and stir it into the mixture.

  5. Add sugar to taste and mix well.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a mold and refrigerate until set.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the other ingredients are combined into.
Breadcrumbs
Soak up liquid and thicken the mixture to give it body.
Egg yolks
Thicken and set the pudding as it cools, giving it a rich texture.
Butter
Adds fat, richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the mixture.

The step that matters

Pour the mixture into a mold and refrigerate until set. The pudding sets as it chills because egg yolk proteins and breadcrumb starch firm up on cooling. It needs enough time to chill fully, or it will stay loose and fail to hold its shape when unmolded.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, butter, 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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