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Dessert

Snowball Pudding

A custard dessert topped with meringue balls.

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 and thicken it with flour or arrow-root.

  2. Beat the yolks with sugar.

  3. Slowly pour in the thickened milk while stirring.

  4. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish.

  5. Brown the custard slightly.

Top and finish

  1. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks, adding sugar and lemon flavoring.

  2. Drop the meringue on the browned custard in egg-sized balls.

  3. Return to the oven to brown the meringue.

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, providing liquid and richness.
Flour or arrow-root
Thickens the boiled milk so the custard holds its shape.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the custard as they set with heat.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they form the airy meringue topping.

The step that matters

Slowly pour in the thickened milk while stirring. Adding hot milk to beaten yolks too fast can scramble the eggs. Pouring slowly while stirring gradually warms the yolks 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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