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Snow Balls

Rice balls shaped like snow, cooked with salt and water, served with butter, sugar, or wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Snow Balls

Why it works: Sugar and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,147 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Snow Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Pick out imperfections from the rice.

  2. Rinse the rice in water, rubbing it between your hands, then drain the water and repeat the rinsing process.

Cook

  1. In a 2-quart saucepan, combine the rice, salt, and water.

  2. Cover and simmer gently for 1 hour until the water is absorbed.

Shape and serve

  1. Dip teacups in cold water, fill with the rice, and press to shape.

  2. Turn the rice out onto a dish and serve with butter, sugar, or wine 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.

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. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

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

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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
Forms the body of the snowballs as the grains swell and soften while cooking.
Water
Cooks the rice by soaking into the grains until fully absorbed.
Salt
Seasons the rice as it cooks in the water.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until the water is absorbed. Gentle heat lets the grains absorb water evenly and soften without breaking apart. A hard boil can split grains and leave them mushy or unevenly cooked, which makes the rice hard to shape.

“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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