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Dessert

Rice Snow Balls

Rice snow balls are rice formed into small balls, coated with a custard made of egg yolks, milk, corn starch, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and corn match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 933 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rice Snow Balls

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Boil the rice in water with salt until soft.

  2. Fill small cups with the rice and let them cool completely.

  3. Turn the rice out onto a dish.

Make the custard

  1. In a saucepan, combine egg yolks, milk, corn starch, and lemon flavor.

  2. Cook over low heat, stirring until it thickens like soft custard.

Assemble and serve

  1. Pour the custard over the rice 30 minutes before serving.

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 + corntop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together933 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 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
Forms the bulk of the dessert and sets into firm shapes once cooled.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness through their proteins and fat.
Milk
Provides the liquid base of the custard and adds creaminess.
Corn starch
Thickens the custard by swelling with heat to give a smooth, soft body.

The step that matters

Cook the custard over low heat, stirring. Egg yolk proteins set at gentle temperatures, so high heat or no stirring can curdle the custard. Gentle, constant stirring keeps it smooth as it thickens.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, egg, milk, corn. 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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