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Dessert

Snowball Custard

A custard dessert with folded egg white balls, sweetened milk, and flavored with lemon or vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Snowball Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the islands

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  2. Sweeten the milk and bring it to a boil.

  3. Drop spoonfuls of the beaten egg whites into the boiling milk.

  4. Turn the whites as they rise until fully cooked, then place them in a glass dish.

Make the custard and serve

  1. In the same milk, stir in the beaten yolks and sugar until it thickens.

  2. Remove from heat and flavor with lemon or vanilla.

  3. Pour the custard around the egg white balls in the glass 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 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).

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
Beaten into a stiff foam that cooks into light, airy floating puffs.
Milk
Poaches the egg white puffs and becomes the base of the custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the milk and custard.
Lemon or vanilla extract
Adds aroma and flavor to the finished custard.

The step that matters

Turn the whites as they rise until fully cooked. Egg whites cook quickly in simmering milk, but if they are not turned they can cook unevenly and stay raw or wet on one side. Turning them lets every side set so each puff holds its shape.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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