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Boiled Flour, or Flour Ball

A boiled flour ball made by boiling flour in milk, drying, grating, and reheating with milk.

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 to form a firm mass.

  2. Boil the bag until bedtime.

  3. Remove the bag and let it dry overnight.

Make and serve

  1. In the morning, grate the 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 1 pint of milk and heat until just boiling.

  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
Starch that binds into a firm mass and later thickens the milk when heated.
Milk
Liquid that forms the paste and adds moisture and body to the drink.

The step that matters

Mixing the powder into a paste before adding it to the hot milk. Starch clumps when it hits hot liquid directly. Blending the powder with a little cold milk first lets the grains separate, so the mixture thickens smoothly.

“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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