Skip to main content
Dessert

Snow Balls

A steamed lemon-flavored dessert made from sugar, flour, egg yolks, and lemon rind, rolled in powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Snow Balls

Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Snow Balls

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg yolks until very light.

  2. Gradually add the sugar and beat well.

  3. Mix in the lemon juice, lemon rind, and enough water to combine.

  4. Sift the flour and baking powder together, then add to the mixture and beat well.

  5. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam in well-buttered earthen cups for 30 minutes.

  2. Once done, roll in powdered sugar and serve with strawberry sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps make it light when beaten with the yolks.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the snowballs together as they steam.
Baking powder
Releases gas during steaming, helping the batter rise and stay tender.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Fold in the egg whites gently. Stiffly beaten whites hold air bubbles that lift the batter as it steams. Overmixing deflates that air, leaving the snowballs dense instead of light.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, flour):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes