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Dessert

Snow-Balls

Apples filled with sugar and cinnamon, rolled in rice, boiled, and served with pudding sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Snow-Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Swell the rice in water with the lemon peel until tender, then drain.

  2. Divide the rice into five parts.

Assemble the apples

  1. Core each apple and fill the hole with sugar and cinnamon.

  2. Roll each apple in a part of the rice and tie tightly in separate cloths.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for 1 hour, then untie and serve with pudding sauce.

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. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
Swells as it cooks and forms a starchy coating that holds around each apple.
Apples
Supply the fruit filling that softens as it boils, becoming tender inside the rice crust.
Sugar
Sweetens the apple filling and adds flavor where it sits in the core.

The step that matters

Tying the rice-coated apples tightly in cloths. Loose cloths let rice wash off or loosen during boiling, leaving the apple exposed. Firm, even wrapping keeps the rice coating in contact with the fruit and holds its shape.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, apple, sugar, 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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