Skip to main content
Dessert

Snow-balls

A boiled dessert of rice and apples flavored with cinnamon, lemon peel, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Snow-balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Swell the rice in the milk.

  2. Strain the rice and lay it around the cored apples.

Fill and wrap the apples

  1. Place a piece of cinnamon, a strip of lemon peel, and a clove in each apple.

  2. Tie the apples up in a cloth.

Cook

  1. Boil them well.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Starch that swells and softens as it cooks, forming a soft coating around each apple.
Milk
Liquid that swells the rice and adds richness and a creamy texture.
Apples
Fruit that softens while boiling, giving sweetness and a tender body to the dessert.
Cinnamon
Spice that adds warm aroma to the apples as they cook.

The step that matters

Boil them well. Rice starch only becomes fully tender after prolonged cooking in liquid, and the apple flesh must soften through as well. Under-boiling leaves the rice chalky and the apples firm inside the cloth.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

You might also like

Lemon Rice PuddingLemon Rice Pudding19 recipesApple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipes