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Dessert

Snow Eggs for Trifles, &C.

A dessert component made by whipping egg whites, cooking them in milk, and thickening with yolks and orange‑flower water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 ↓

Snow Eggs for Trifles, &C.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the egg whites until they form a thick froth, about 30 minutes.

  2. Boil the milk in a pot.

Poach the whites

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the whipped egg whites onto the boiling milk, cooking until they look like snow.

  2. Remove each spoonful as it cooks and place on a sieve to drain.

Make the custard and serve

  1. Add lemon peel and sugar to the remaining milk to sweeten it.

  2. Stir in the beaten egg yolks and orange-flower water until the mixture thickens but is not as thick as cream.

  3. Pour into a serving dish and use as directed for trifle.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Milk + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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 into a foam that holds its shape and sets as it cooks in the milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and gently cooks the whipped whites.
Egg yolks
Thicken the milk into a custard as their proteins set with gentle heat.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard.
Orange-flower water
Adds a floral aroma to the custard.

The step that matters

Thickening the custard. Egg yolks thicken the milk as their proteins set with gentle heat. If the custard gets too hot or boils, the yolks can curdle and turn grainy, so stir steadily and stop when it coats a spoon lightly.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Blueberryfits about as well

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