Skip to main content
Dessert

Rice Snow Balls

Rice Snow Balls are sweet rice balls coated in a cooled custard flavored with lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rice and corn match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 933 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rice Snow Balls

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Boil the rice in water with salt until soft.

  2. Place the cooked rice in small cups and let it cool completely.

Make the custard

  1. Prepare a boiled custard by mixing egg yolks, sweet milk, and corn starch in a saucepan.

  2. Flavor the custard with lemon and cook until thickened.

  3. Once the custard is cold, pour it over the rice balls half an hour before serving.

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. Rice + corntop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

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

  5. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the body of the snow balls, becoming soft and tender when boiled.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness as they set during gentle cooking.
Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and adds creaminess.
Corn starch
Thickens the custard so it coats the rice rather than running off.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard until thickened. Egg yolks and milk can curdle or turn grainy if overheated, while undercooking leaves the custard thin. Cooking gently while stirring keeps it smooth and lets the starch and yolks set properly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, egg, milk, corn. 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.

You might also like

Lemon Rice PuddingLemon Rice Pudding19 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesRice CakeRice Cake120 recipes