Skip to main content
Dessert

Orange Snowballs

A dessert of boiled rice and orange wrapped in buttered, floured pudding bags, dusted with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Orange Snowballs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the rice for 10 minutes, then drain and cool.

  2. Peel the oranges, removing all the white rind.

  3. Butter and flour small pudding bags for each orange.

  4. Spread the bags with rice and place an orange in each.

Cook and serve

  1. Tie up the bags and boil for 1 hour.

  2. Turn out onto a serving dish, sprinkle with powdered sugar, and serve with sauce or sweetened cream.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Rice + orangetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 soft, starchy body that packs around each orange and holds its shape when boiled.
Oranges
Provide the juicy citrus flavour and aroma at the centre of each dessert.

The step that matters

Removing all the white rind from the oranges. The white pith under the peel is bitter. Any left on the fruit will carry that bitterness into the pudding, so it should be removed completely before the oranges are wrapped.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, butter, flour, sugar, sauce. 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesRice CakeRice Cake120 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipes