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Dessert

Batter of Timbales

A batter made from flour, milk, egg, and lard for frying timbales.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Batter of Timbales

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Put the flour into a basin.

  2. Add the yolk of the egg.

  3. Gradually stir in the milk.

  4. Whip the egg white to a stiff froth and gently fold it into the mixture.

Fry

  1. Dip a hot iron mold into the batter and fry in deep boiling lard.

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 + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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

Flour
Provides the structure that sets the batter into a firm, cooked crust.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and thins the mixture into a pourable batter.
Egg
The yolk enriches and binds, while the whipped white adds air that lightens the batter.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg white. The whipped white holds air that gives the batter lift. Stirring vigorously or folding roughly deflates the foam, leaving a dense, heavy batter that fries up flat.

“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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