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Dessert

Snow Balls

Apples are wrapped in rice, boiled, and served with a sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 the apples

  1. Pare the apples and scoop out the cores.

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

Wrap and boil

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

  2. Wrap the rice around each apple in thin cloths and tie them up separately.

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

  4. Gently turn the apples into a dish to avoid breaking the rice.

Serve

  1. 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. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Hold the filling and provide the soft, tender body inside the rice coating.
Rice
Forms the outer coating that wraps and shapes each apple as it cooks.
Milk
Soaks into the rice, adding creaminess and moisture to the coating.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the melted butter sauce.

The step that matters

Gently turn the apples into a dish. Once boiled, the rice coating is soft and tender and tears easily. Moving the apples carefully keeps the wrap intact so the rice stays around the fruit.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Macethe original

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