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Dessert

Snow Cream

Snow Cream is a frozen dessert made from thick sweet cream, cornstarch, egg whites, sweetener, and flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Snow Cream

Why it works: Egg and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Snow Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Heat the cream in a saucepan until it is ready to boil.

  2. Blend the cornstarch with some cold cream and stir it into the boiling cream quickly.

  3. Sweeten to taste and let it boil gently for 2-3 minutes while stirring.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the beaten egg whites quickly.

  2. Do not let it boil more than once after adding them.

  3. Flavor with your choice of lemon, vanilla, bitter almond, or grated lemon peel.

  4. Spoon the mixture into rocky heaps on silver or glass dishes, or into shapes.

  5. Chill before serving.

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

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

  2. Cream + eggtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Cream + lemontop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Sweet cream
Provides the rich fat and body that make the dessert creamy and smooth.
Cornstarch
Thickens the cream as it boils, giving the mixture a soft, spoonable set.
Egg whites
Whipped into the hot mixture to add lightness and a foamy, airy texture.

The step that matters

Adding the egg whites. Egg whites must be folded in quickly and the mixture kept from boiling again. Repeated boiling can cause the whites to deflate or toughen and the texture to turn watery or grainy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, egg. 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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