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Dessert

Snow Cakes

A batter of milk, flour, and salt folded with snow, fried in lard to make a snowy cake.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Snow Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix milk, flour, and salt to make a batter.

  2. Gently fold in new-fallen snow.

Fry

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into hot lard.

  2. Fry until golden brown.

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).

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

Milk
Hydrates the flour and forms the liquid base of the batter.
Flour
Provides structure so the batter holds its shape while frying.
New-fallen snow
Adds cold air and water that lighten the batter's texture.
Hot lard
Conducts heat to cook the batter and browns its surface.

The step that matters

Gently fold in new-fallen snow. Overmixing knocks out the air trapped in the snow and deflates the batter, so the fritters turn out dense rather than light. Fold only until just combined.

“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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