Skip to main content
Dessert

Snowflake Sauce

A sweet sauce made from white coffee sugar, butter, milk, corn starch, maraschino, and egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Snowflake Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cream the white coffee sugar with the butter.

  2. Thicken the boiling milk with the corn starch mixed with a little cold milk, cooking for five minutes while stirring constantly.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then add the maraschino, creamed butter, and sugar.

  4. Cut and fold in the egg white beaten very stiffly.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Coffee + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,202 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Coffee + corntop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together247 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Corn starch
Thickens the boiling milk into a smooth, glossy sauce base.
Egg white
Beaten stiff and folded in, it adds a light, airy texture to the sauce.
Butter
Creamed with the sugar, it adds richness and a smooth, velvety mouthfeel.
White coffee sugar
Creamed with butter and added later, it provides sweetness and body.

The step that matters

Fold in the egg white. Beaten egg white holds air only when stiff; overmixing or deflating it while folding causes the sauce to lose its lightness. Fold gently, cutting through the mixture rather than stirring.

“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.

You might also like

Coffee Ice CreamCoffee Ice Cream91 recipesCorn CakeCorn Cake90 recipesCorn Starch CakeCorn Starch Cake89 recipesCoffee CustardCoffee Custard27 recipes