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Dessert

Apple Snow Balls

Apple Snow Balls are boiled apples filled with rice, cloves, lemon peel, and seasoned with nutmeg, butter, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Apple Snow Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Peel and quarter the apples, removing the cores completely.

  2. Reassemble the quarters to form the shape of the apple, placing a clove and a slice of lemon peel in the cavity.

  3. Cover each apple with rice using small pudding cloths, tying them tightly.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the apples in a large saucepan of scalding water for 1 hour.

  2. After boiling, open the tops and mix in grated nutmeg, butter, and 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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Rice + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the fruit body that softens during boiling and carries the clove and lemon flavour.
Rice
Forms a starchy coating around each apple that cooks into a shell as it boils.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty mouthfeel to the cooked apple.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tartness of the apple.

The step that matters

Tying the rice cloths. If the cloths are loose, rice can wash off or swell unevenly in the boiling water, leaving bare patches of apple exposed and an uneven coating.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, clove, lemon, nutmeg, 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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