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Snow Balls

Rice balls filled with apples, lemon peel, cloves, and cinnamon, boiled until cooked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Snow Balls

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon 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

  1. Swell the rice in milk and strain it.

  2. Pare and core the apples.

Assemble

  1. Wrap the rice around each apple and tie them in a cloth.

  2. Add a piece of lemon peel, a clove, or a sprinkle of cinnamon to each apple.

Cook

  1. Boil the wrapped apples 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.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 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. Lemon + cinnamontop 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
Swells and forms a starchy wrapper that encloses each apple as it cooks.
Milk
Soaks into the rice, adding moisture and a creamy, soft texture.
Apples
Form the sweet, tender filling at the centre of each snowball.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma and flavour to the apple inside the rice.

The step that matters

Boiling the wrapped apples well. Boiling sets the rice starch into a firm, cohesive coating and cooks the apple through. If it boils too briefly, the rice stays raw and the apple firm; if the cloth is loose, the rice can break away during cooking.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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