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Sauce for Snow Pudding

A custard-like sauce made from egg yolks, sugar, milk, and vanilla, used for snow pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Sauce for Snow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Beat together the yolks of 6 eggs and ½ cup sugar.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons milk and ½ teaspoon salt to the egg mixture.

  3. Heat 1 pint milk in a double boiler until it comes to a boil.

  4. Stir the egg mixture into the boiling milk and cook for 2 minutes.

Finish and cool

  1. Remove from heat and set the bowl in ice water.

  2. Flavor with vanilla extract.

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 + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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 yolks
Thicken the custard as they cook and add richness to the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps soften the egg yolks for smooth blending.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and provides creaminess.

The step that matters

Cooking the egg mixture into the boiling milk. Egg yolks can scramble if they get too hot too fast. Stirring the mixture into the hot milk and cooking gently for the stated time helps it thicken smoothly instead of curdling.

“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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