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Snow Balls

A fried dough pastry made from eggs, sweet milk, flour, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Snow Balls

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 ↓

Snow Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat eggs and sweet milk together in a bowl.

  2. Add flour until a stiff dough forms, then mix in a little coarse sea salt.

  3. Roll the dough thin and cut into 4‑inch squares using a notched pastry cutter.

Fry the snow balls

  1. Heat hot lard in a pan.

  2. Mark each square into strips ½ inch wide, leaving a ½ inch border.

  3. Pick up the squares by alternating strips and lay them sideways in the hot lard.

  4. Fry until they puff up into flaky balls.

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure to the final texture.
Flour
Forms the stiff dough that holds its shape and puffs into a flaky interior when fried.
Hot lard
Fries the dough quickly, so moisture turns to steam and makes the squares puff.

The step that matters

Laying the squares in the hot lard. The lard must be hot before the squares go in. Hot fat seals the surface quickly and turns moisture into steam, which makes the dough puff into flaky balls. Cold or slow fat soaks in grease and the squares stay dense.

“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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