Skip to main content
Dessert

Snow Balls

A dessert of boiled apples stuffed with spices and rice, served with a sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
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 the apples

  1. Pare the apples and scoop out the cores.

  2. Fill the cores with lemon rind, a clove, a piece of cinnamon or mace, and sugar.

  3. Wash and soak enough rice in milk to cover the apples.

  4. Wrap each apple in a cloth with rice and tie them up separately.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the wrapped apples in a pot of cold water and boil for over an hour.

  2. Gently turn them into a dish to avoid breaking the rice.

  3. Serve with a sweet sauce made of sugar, butter, nutmeg, cinnamon, and white wine, or just sugar and melted butter.

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. Cinnamon + ricetop 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

Apples
Form the body of the dessert and soften into a tender, sweet filling as they cook.
Rice
Forms a starchy coating around each apple that holds its shape during boiling.
Milk
Softens the rice as it soaks and adds richness to the coating.
Sugar
Sweetens the apple filling and the serving sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the serving sauce.

The step that matters

Gently turn them into a dish. The rice coating is soft after long boiling and can tear easily. Lifting the wrapped apples carefully keeps the rice intact around each apple.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

More snow balls recipes

Rice 17 See all 31 →

You might also like

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