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Dessert

Rice Snowballs

Rice snowballs are sweet rice balls made with milk, sugar, almond or lemon essence, custard, and topped with preserve.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Rice Snowballs

Why it works: Rice and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,456 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Rice Snowballs

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Boil the rice in the milk with sugar and essence of almonds until tender, adding more milk if necessary.

  2. Once the rice is soft, pour it into teacups or small round jars and let it cool.

Serve

  1. Turn the rice out onto a deep glass dish.

  2. Pour custard over the rice balls and top each with a small piece of preserve or jelly.

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. Rice + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  3. Milk + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,800 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
Starch that softens as it simmers in milk, thickening into a tender body that holds its shape when cooled.
Milk
Liquid that cooks into the rice, giving it a creamy texture and moisture as it absorbs.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the rice as it cooks in the milk.

The step that matters

Cooking the rice until tender. Rice must absorb liquid slowly and fully; adding more milk as needed keeps it from scorching or drying out, and it must be soft enough to hold its shape when cooled and turned out.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Peanutfits about as well
  2. Almondthe original
  3. Beansfits about as well
  4. Milletfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, 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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