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Dessert

Snow Ball Pudding

A steamed pudding made with butter, sugar, flour, baking powder, milk, and egg whites.

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

Snow Ball Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the butter and sugar.

  2. Sift the flour and baking powder together.

  3. Add the dry ingredients to the creamed mixture alternately with the milk.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam in pudding molds for 40 minutes.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and gives the pudding a tender, rich crumb.
Sugar
Creaming with butter creates air pockets and adds sweetness and tenderness.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding's shape after steaming.
Baking powder
Releases gas during steaming, helping the pudding rise and become light.
Milk
Adds moisture and liquid that hydrates the flour to form the batter.
Egg whites
Beaten whites trap air and add lift, giving a lighter, more open texture.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently preserves the air bubbles in the whites. Stirring or beating them down removes that air, so the pudding rises less and turns out denser.

“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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