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Dessert

Rice Snow Balls

Rice snow balls are rice cooked in milk, wrapped around apple pieces with lemon peel and cinnamon, boiled, and served with butter and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,598 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Rice Snow Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Boil rice in milk until swollen and soft.

Assemble the snowballs

  1. Core the apples and fill each with grated lemon peel and cinnamon.

  2. Cover each apple with rice and tie securely with string.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the apples for 2 hours.

  2. Serve with melted butter sweetened with sugar.

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. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rice
Softens in milk and forms the outer coating that encloses each apple.
Milk
Cooks into the rice, making it swollen and soft so it holds together around the apple.
Apples
Provide the fruit filling that softens and turns sweet-tart as it boils.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the serving sauce, coating the rice and fruit.
Sugar
Sweetens the melted butter served alongside the snowballs.

The step that matters

Tying the rice coating. If the rice is not tied securely with string, the coating can separate from the apple during boiling. Rice that is swollen and soft sticks together more easily, so it is best to press it firmly around the fruit before tying.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, apple, cinnamon, butter, 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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