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Dessert

Snow Balls

A fried dough ring made from eggs, milk, butter, sugar, baking powder, flour, lemon flavoring, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Snow Balls

Why it works: Milk and butter 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 Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the eggs until stiff.

  2. Mix in the milk, butter, sugar, baking powder, and lemon flavoring.

  3. Add flour gradually until the mixture is stiff.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll out the dough thin and cut into rings.

  2. Fry the rings in hot lard 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.

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 + buttertop 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. Milk + flourtop 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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Eggs
Whipped stiff to give the dough air and a light, tender structure.
Milk
Adds moisture so the dough can be worked into a smooth, rollable mixture.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough, helping the rings puff and lighten as they fry.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps the rings brown richly in the hot fat.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and rich flavor.
Flour
Provides the starch and gluten that set the dough and give it body.

The step that matters

Fry the rings in hot lard until golden brown. If the lard is not hot enough, the rings soak up fat and turn greasy and heavy instead of crisp and light. Frying at a steady high heat seals the surface quickly, so the inside cooks through while the outside browns.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, butter, 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.

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