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Dessert

Rice and Apples, or Snow-balls

A dessert of boiled rice mixed with stewed apples and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,311 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Rice and Apples, or Snow-balls

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Boil the rice in hot water until tender.

  2. Strain the rice through a colander.

  3. Expose the rice to heat for 10-15 minutes to dry slightly.

Prepare the apples

  1. Peel and core the apples.

  2. Stew the apples separately until soft.

Combine

  1. Mix the stewed apples with the rice.

  2. Add sugar 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. Rice + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,311 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Rice
Forms the starchy base that holds the snowball shape once cooked and dried.
Apples
Add moisture, tartness and soft texture when stewed into the rice.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, balancing the tartness of the apples.

The step that matters

Drying the rice. Drying the rice slightly after straining lets surface moisture evaporate, so the rice mixture holds together rather than becoming wet and loose when combined with the stewed apples.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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