Skip to main content
Dessert

Rice Snowballs

Rice snowballs are sweet rice balls served with custard, jelly or jam, flavored with vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Rice Snowballs

Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Rice Snowballs

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Boil the rice in milk until perfectly cooked and soft.

  2. Sweeten the rice to taste and flavor with vanilla.

  3. Wet small cups with cold water and fill them with the boiled rice.

Make the custard

  1. In a saucepan, combine 1 pint of milk, 2 beaten eggs, and 1 teaspoon of cornflour mixed with cold milk.

  2. Sweeten the custard to taste and cook, stirring until thick like rich cream.

  3. Set the custard aside to cool.

Serve

  1. Turn out the rice onto a serving plate, placing a lump of jelly or jam on each snowball.

  2. Spoon the cold custard around the rice snowballs.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

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

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

  3. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  4. Rice + vanillatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,352 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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
Cooked in milk until soft, it forms the body of each snowball.
Milk
Cooks the rice until tender and forms the base of the custard.
Eggs
Thicken the custard as they set with heat.
Cornflour
Thickens the custard so it becomes rich and smooth.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard. Cornflour and egg thicken the custard only when heated and stirred. Stirring prevents lumps and scorching on the base of the pan, and the custard thickens further as it cools.

“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

Rice CakeRice Cake120 recipesVanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesRice CreamRice Cream43 recipesRice JellyRice Jelly42 recipes