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Rice Snow Balls
Boil one pint rice until soft in two quarts water with a tea-spoon salt; put in small cups, and when perfectly cold place in a dish. Make a boiled custard of the yolks of three eggs, one pint sweet milk, and one tea-spoon corn-starch; flavor with lemon. When cold, pour over the rice-balls half an hour before serving. This is a very simple but nice dessert. - Miss Louise Skinner.
A molded rice dessert with a pouring custard, from an era when a cook was trusted to know that a custard needs sugar. Two things need attention: the missing sweetener and the fact that a "boiled custard" must not actually boil.
- The custard must not boilDespite the name, cook the yolks, milk and cornstarch in a double boiler or over low heat, stirring, until it coats a spoon at about 175F. Real boiling curdles the yolks and you get sweet scrambled egg in a thin liquid.
- Add sugarThe recipe gives none, though a custard of this kind would normally have been sweetened. About 1/3 cup for a pint of milk gives a custard in the range of a modern creme anglaise; the rice itself is seasoned only with salt.
- MeasuresOne pint dry rice is 2 cups, which cooks up to roughly 6 cups — enough for 10 or 12 small molds. Halve everything if you want four or five servings. The 2 quarts of water is a boiling-and-draining ratio, not an absorption one.
- Cook the rice soft, then drainLong-grain rice boiled loose in salted water then drained will be sticky enough to hold a shape, but short-grain or pudding rice molds far better. Simmer 18-20 minutes until quite soft, drain well, and pack the cups while still hot.
- UnmoldingRinse the cups with cold water before filling and press the rice down firmly. Chill until completely cold — several hours — then run a thin knife around the edge and turn out. Warm rice will slump.
- Sweet milkNineteenth-century shorthand for fresh whole milk, as opposed to sour or buttermilk. Whole milk is the right substitute; the cornstarch is there to give body that three yolks alone would not.
- Flavor with lemonEither a few drops of lemon extract stirred in off the heat, or a strip of zest steeped in the hot milk and lifted out before thickening. Lemon juice will curdle the custard.
- AssemblyPour the cold custard over the cold molds half an hour ahead, as directed — earlier and the rice absorbs the sauce and the balls lose their edges.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) grew out of contributions gathered from Ohio households, which is why so many entries carry a name like Miss Louise Skinner's. Molded rice desserts belong to a long line of thrift cookery: rice was cheap, filling and shelf-stable, and boiling it plain in salted water then shaping it in teacups turned a few cents' worth of grain into something that could be set on a table with a custard poured around it. The "snow ball" name attaches loosely to any small white domed dessert of the period — rice, suet dumplings, coconut-covered cakes — and here it describes nothing more than the shape of the cup. The pairing of an unsweetened starch mold with a sweet boiled custard seems to have been a familiar combination, and a similar custard, thickened with cornstarch, turns up throughout the puddings and sauces chapters of American cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s.