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Dessert

Snowball Pudding

A custard pudding topped with meringue balls, baked until lightly browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Snowball Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Thicken the milk with flour or arrow-root.

  3. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with the sugar.

  4. Slowly pour the thickened milk into the egg yolk mixture, stirring continuously.

  5. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish and brown it slightly in the oven.

Top with meringue

  1. In another bowl, beat the egg whites to stiff peaks, adding sugar and lemon flavoring.

  2. Drop spoonfuls of the meringue onto the browned custard in the shape of balls.

  3. Return the dish to the oven to brown the meringue slightly.

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 + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Rich milk
Forms the body of the custard and gives it a rich, creamy texture.
Flour or arrow-root
Thickens the milk so the custard sets softly rather than staying runny.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help set the custard as they cook.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks to form the airy, light meringue topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps stabilise the whipped egg whites.

The step that matters

Adding the thickened milk to the egg yolks. Pouring hot milk into the yolks too quickly can scramble them. Pouring slowly while stirring constantly warms the yolks gradually so the custard stays smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, egg, 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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