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Boiled Flour or Flour Ball

A boiled flour ball made by tying flour in a bag, boiled, dried, grated, and mixed with milk to form a nursing paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 ↓

Boiled Flour or Flour Ball

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flour ball

  1. Tie the flour in a pudding bag tightly to form a solid mass.

  2. Place the bag in a pot of boiling water and boil until bedtime.

  3. Remove the bag and let it dry overnight.

  4. In the morning, peel off the thin rind of dough.

Make the drink

  1. Grate the hard dry mass into a powder using a nutmeg grater.

  2. Mix 1 to 3 teaspoons of the powder with a little milk to form a paste.

  3. Add the paste to about 1 pint of milk and bring to just boiling point.

  4. Serve through a nursing bottle.

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).

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

Flour
Forms a solid starch mass that, once dried and grated, thickens the milk into a porridge-like drink.
Milk
Provides liquid and body; the powder thickens it when the paste is stirred in and heated.

The step that matters

Boil the tied flour until fully cooked. The bag must be boiled long enough for the starch in the flour to gelatinise and set into a firm, dry mass. Undercooked flour stays pasty and will not grate or thicken the milk properly.

“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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