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Snow Balls

Snow Balls are small fried dough pieces made from eggs, flour, salt, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Snow Balls

Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Snow Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a bowl, beat the eggs with a pinch of salt.

  2. Gradually add flour until a stiff dough forms.

Shape

  1. Roll the dough thin and cut it into 4‑inch blocks.

  2. Cut the blocks into strips and tangle them.

Fry

  1. Fry the tangled strips in hot lard until golden.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Eggs
Bind the flour and add richness and structure to the dough.
Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its stiff, sturdy structure.
Lard
Conducts heat for frying and gives the strips a golden, crisp surface.

The step that matters

Frying the tangled strips in hot lard until golden. If the lard is not hot enough, the strips absorb more fat and turn greasy; if it is too hot, the outside browns before the inside cooks through. Steady heat gives an even golden crust.

“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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