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Milk and Flour Ball

A boiled flour ball mixed with milk, then boiled again and sweetened.

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

Prepare the flour

  1. Tie the flour in a cloth and boil for 3 to 4 hours.

  2. Let it cool; it will form a solid ball.

  3. Grate the solid ball.

Make the sauce

  1. Blend ½ ounce of the grated mixture with ½ pint of milk.

  2. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly.

  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, cooked into a firm mass and then grated, thickens the milk.
Milk
Provides the liquid base and body of the finished mixture.

The step that matters

Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Milk scorches easily on the bottom of a pan, and the starch can clump unevenly if it is heated without constant stirring. Keeping the mixture moving spreads the heat and keeps it smooth.

“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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