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Dessert

Another Recipe for Snow Pudding

A gelatin dessert made with gelatine, boiling water, sugar, egg whites, lemon juice, served with custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Another Recipe for Snow Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the set mixture

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in boiling water.

  2. Strain and add the lemon juice.

  3. Stir in the sugar.

  4. When cool, fold in the well-beaten egg whites.

  5. Beat until very thick.

Shape and serve

  1. Mold the mixture.

  2. Serve with a custard made from the egg yolks, flavored with lemon.

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

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a soft, sliceable structure as it cools.
Egg whites
Whipped into foam, they make the pudding light and airy.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright flavor that balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Fold in the egg whites when the mixture is cool. If the gelatine is still too hot, it deflates the whites and the foam collapses. If it has already begun to set, lumps form and the whites will not blend evenly, so the pudding loses its lightness.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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