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Apple Snowballs
Take half a dozen large apples. Pare and core them without breaking them, and place in the hollow of each a spoonful of sugar, a piece of butter the size of a small nut, and either a pinch of powdered cinnamon, a little grated lemon-rind, some nutmeg grated, or a clove. Boil a cupful of rice with a little milk till it is half cooked. Put each apple into a separate cloth with a portion of rice sufficient to cover it all round. Spread the rice out, tie it firmly round the apple, plunge the balls into boiling water, and let them boil gently till done enough. Turn them upon a dish; sift powdered white sugar thickly over them, and serve. If liked, a little sweet sauce can be served with these puddings. Time to boil, three-quarters of an hour or more, according to the quality of the apple. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian boiled pudding that needs no oven, only cloths, string and a deep pan of water. The technique is straightforward once you accept that the rice jacket must be applied while it is still sticky and only half-swollen.
- The hinge: half-cooked riceSimmer the rice in milk only until the grains are swollen but still chalky at the centre, roughly 8-10 minutes for a short-grain pudding rice. Rice cooked through is likely to be too slack to wrap and hold its jacket through the long boil.
- A cupful of riceAround 200 g of short or medium grain rice, divided between the six apples. Long-grain rice will not cling; use pudding, arborio or similar.
- Butter the size of a small nutRead as a hazelnut rather than a walnut: about 1 teaspoon, 5 g, per apple.
- The pudding clothsSquares of scalded cotton or muslin, wrung out and floured or buttered on the inside so the rice releases cleanly. Tie firmly with kitchen string, as the recipe directs, and unroll the parcels rather than pulling them off.
- Apples that hold togetherChoose a firm cooking apple that keeps its shape rather than a Bramley, which collapses to froth inside its jacket and bursts the rice. Coring without breaking the fruit is easiest with an apple corer pushed straight down from the stem end.
- Boiling and timingKeep the water at a bare, steady simmer, fully covering the balls, and top up with boiling water as it drops. Three-quarters of an hour is a fair minimum; the apple should feel soft when a skewer goes through the cloth.
- Cost and yieldTenpence in old money is simply the author's marketing note, of no use now. The recipe makes six puddings and is described as serving five or six.
- The sweet sauceA thin custard, or a sugar-and-butter sauce slackened with a little lemon juice, both period-appropriate. The recipe treats it as optional ('if liked').
Boiled puddings tied in floured cloths were a mainstay of English domestic cookery from the seventeenth century onward, when a single pot over the fire had to produce the whole meal; puddings, and often the meat, shared the water. "Snowball" was used for round, pale-cased boiled puddings, and in the nineteenth century commonly meant an apple sheathed in rice or in suet paste, dusted white with sifted sugar at the table. Cassell's gives the cost in pence and the number served because its readers were expected to plan by the shilling.