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Dessert

Apple Snow

Apple Snow is a dessert made by cooking apples with lemon rind, folding in egg white and sugar, served with cream or custard.

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

Apple Snow

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the apple

  1. Peel, core, and cut the apple into quarters.

  2. Thinly slice the rind of ½ lemon and add it to the apple in an enamel saucepan with a little water to prevent burning.

  3. Cook until the apple is soft, then remove the lemon rind and let the apple cool.

  4. Beat the cooled apple to a pulp.

Make the snow

  1. Whisk the egg white to stiff peaks, then fold it into the apple pulp.

  2. Gradually add castor sugar while whisking until the mixture is stiff.

Serve

  1. Serve with cream or boiled custard.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Apple
Provides the main body and tart fruit flavour of the dish once cooked to a pulp.
Egg white
Whisked to stiff peaks, it traps air and gives the dish its light, snowy foam texture.
Castor sugar
Sweetens the pulp and stabilises the whisked foam so it holds its shape.

The step that matters

Whisking the egg white to stiff peaks. Egg white must be whisked until it holds stiff peaks and is folded in gently; under-whipped white collapses and leaves the dish flat, while over-whisking makes it grainy and dry.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Applethe original

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