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Dessert

Apple Snowballs

Apple Snowballs are apples wrapped in rice, boiled, and served with sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,311 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Snowballs

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Tie each apple in a cloth with enough rice to cover them completely.

  2. Boil the wrapped apples for 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with sweet 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 + ricetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,311 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Rice + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,396 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Apple + saucetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together965 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Hold their shape and turn tender and sweet as they cook inside the rice coating.
Partially boiled rice
Forms a starchy coating that cushions the apples and shapes the snowball as it cooks.

The step that matters

Wrapping the apples. The rice must fully cover each apple. Any exposed fruit can break down or discolour in the boiling water, so the coating needs to be complete and snug.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, sauce. 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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