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Flour Ball

A thickened milk mixture made by boiling flour in a bag, grating, and mixing with milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Flour Ball

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flour

  1. Tie the flour firmly in a pudding bag.

  2. Boil the bag for 10 hours.

  3. After boiling, open the bag; the outer layer will be doughy, and the interior will be hard and dry.

  4. Grate the hard mass into a fine powder.

Make the thickened milk

  1. Rub 1 teaspoon of the powder with 1 tablespoon of milk to form a smooth paste.

  2. Add a second tablespoon of milk, rubbing until a cream-like mixture forms.

  3. Pour this mixture into 8 ounces of hot milk, stirring well.

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. Wheat + milktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk 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

Unbolted wheat flour
Boiled in its bag, the starch sets into a hard mass that is later grated into thickening powder.
Milk
Wets the powder into a smooth paste so it disperses evenly before being stirred into hot milk.

The step that matters

Rubbing the powder into a smooth paste. Adding the powder to liquid all at once forms lumps that are hard to remove. Mixing it first with a little cold milk to a smooth paste lets the particles separate, so they thicken the hot milk evenly.

“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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