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Dessert

Snow Cream

A chilled dessert made from cream, lemon juice, egg whites, sweet wine, sugar, and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Snow Cream

Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Snow Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream base

  1. Add the juice of 3 lemons to 1 quart of cream and sweeten to taste.

  2. Whisk the mixture until frothy and strain through a sieve.

  3. Fill glasses with the liquid and top with the froth.

Make the egg white froth

  1. In a separate bowl, beat the whites of 3 eggs until stiff.

  2. Mix in 4 tablespoons of sweet wine, sugar to taste, and a bit of lemon peel.

  3. Whip until frothy, remove the peel, and serve in a dish.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

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

  5. Cream + winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

Cream
Forms the rich liquid base that the lemon juice thickens and sours.
Lemon juice
Acidity curdles and thickens the cream, giving it a tangy flavour.
Egg whites
Whipped into a stiff foam that gives the dish its light, snowy top.
Sugar
Sweetens the dish and helps stabilise the whipped egg white foam.
Sweet wine
Adds aroma and sweetness to the whipped froth.

The step that matters

Whipping the egg whites until stiff. Egg whites must be beaten until they hold stiff peaks; under-whipped whites collapse into the liquid, while over-whipping makes them grainy and dry.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits about as well
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, egg, wine. 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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