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Dessert

American Snow Balls

A boiled dish of apples stuffed with rice, lemon peel, cinnamon, served with butter and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,598 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

American Snow Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the rice in milk until swollen and soft.

  2. Core the apples carefully.

  3. Fill each apple with grated lemon peel and cinnamon.

  4. Place rice on a piece of linen to cover each apple completely and tie securely.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the wrapped apples for 2 hours.

  2. Serve with melted butter sweetened with sugar.

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. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 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
Swells in milk and forms a soft coating that encloses each apple as it cooks.
Milk
Cooks into the rice, carrying moisture so the rice swells and softens.
Apples
Hold their shape under long boiling while the filling warms and softens their flesh.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the melted sauce served with the apples.
Sugar
Sweetens the melted butter served alongside the apples.

The step that matters

Boil the wrapped apples for 2 hours. The linen must be tied securely so the rice stays wrapped around each apple. A loose wrap can let the rice escape into the water, leaving the apples bare and the coating uneven.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, apple, cinnamon, 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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