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Dessert

Snow Pudding

A steamed pudding made with corn starch, egg whites, and a sweet sauce of egg yolks, sugar, milk, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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

Make the pudding

  1. Dissolve the corn starch in a little cold water.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the dissolved corn starch.

  3. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  4. Fold the beaten egg whites into the mixture with a pinch of salt and a little sugar.

  5. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish.

  6. Steam the pudding for 15 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Beat the egg yolks.

  2. Mix the beaten yolks with sugar, milk, and butter.

  3. Boil the sauce mixture until it thickens.

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. Corn + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together349 recipes

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

  3. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn starch
Thickens the mixture as it heats, giving the pudding its body.
Egg whites
Beaten until stiff, they trap air and give the pudding a light, airy structure.
Egg yolks
Enrich the sauce and help it thicken when heated gently.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness to the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce mixture until it thickens. Egg yolks can curdle or scramble if overheated. Cooking the sauce gently while stirring keeps it smooth and lets the yolk proteins thicken it evenly.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Peanutfits about as well
  3. Beansfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, egg, sugar, sauce, milk, butter. 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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