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Flour-ball

A flour ball is boiled, ground into powder, and mixed with milk to form a paste used as a thickener.

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

Make the flour ball

  1. Tie the flour tightly in a strong pudding bag.

  2. Place the bag in a saucepan of water and boil for 3 hours.

  3. When cool, remove the cloth.

  4. Cut away the soft outer covering.

  5. Grate the hard, baked interior into a powder.

Use the paste

  1. To use, rub the required quantity of powder with 1 tablespoon of milk into a smooth paste.

  2. Add a second tablespoon of milk, rubbing until creamy.

  3. Stir this mixture into the total quantity of liquid for the meal.

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

Wheat flour
Forms the dry, hardened ball that is grated into a powder used for thickening.
Milk
Moistens the powder so it rubs into a smooth, creamy paste before mixing.

The step that matters

Boiling the flour in the bag for 3 hours. The long boil cooks and dries the flour into a hard, baked mass. If it is under-cooked, the interior stays soft and will not grate into a usable powder.

“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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