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Dessert

Snow Pudding

A gelatin dessert made with boiling water, sugar, lemon juice, egg whites, milk, and a custard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Gelatin and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 104 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Snow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Dissolve gelatin in a little cold water.

  2. Add boiling water, sugar, and lemon juice; strain the mixture.

  3. Beat in the egg whites for one hour.

  4. Pour the mixture into molds and refrigerate until set.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, make a boiled custard with the egg yolks and milk, adding flavoring to taste.

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. Gelatin + saucetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together104 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Gelatin + sugartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,778 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

Gelatin
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable pudding structure as it chills.
Egg whites
Whipped into the mixture to trap air, giving the pudding a light, airy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the pudding's flavor.
Milk
Forms the base of the custard sauce, adding richness and body.

The step that matters

Beat in the egg whites. The mixture must be cooled and thickened but not yet set when the egg whites are beaten in. If it is too warm, the foam collapses; if it has already gelled, the whites cannot be incorporated evenly and the pudding loses its airy texture.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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