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Dessert

Milk and Flour Ball

A simple dessert made by boiling a flour ball, grating it, and boiling it again with milk and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk 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 ↓

Milk and Flour Ball

Ingredients

Directions

Make the flour ball

  1. Tie the flour in a cloth to form a ball.

  2. Boil the ball in water for 3 to 4 hours.

  3. Let it cool; it will become solid.

  4. Grate the solid flour ball.

Make the milk drink

  1. Blend ½ ounce of the grated flour with 1 cup of milk.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil while stirring continuously.

  3. Boil for 5 minutes, then sweeten to taste.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Flour and milk 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

All-purpose flour
Its starch thickens the milk as the mixture heats and boils.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and gives the finished drink its creamy body.

The step that matters

Stir continuously while bringing the mixture to a boil. Starch granules swell as the mixture heats and can clump or scorch on the bottom if left unstirred. Constant stirring keeps the mixture smooth as it thickens.

“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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