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Apple Snow Balls
Prepare squares of cloth as for individual boiled dumplings and line with a layer of hot boiled rice. Place in the centre chopped, sliced or cored apple, if the last, filling centres with nuts. Tie the cloth well and bake or steam forty minutes.
A Victorian nursery pudding: a whole apple encased in boiled rice, tied in a cloth and steamed until the rice sets into a white shell. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to handle pudding cloths, so most of the work is filling in what is left unsaid.
- Steam rather than bakeBake or steam -- The recipe allows either. Cloth-tied puddings are most reliably steamed, in a steamer or a pot of simmering water. If you bake them, set them in a covered water bath in a moderate oven; the recipe gives no temperature, and without the moist cover the cloth dries and the rice crusts instead of setting.
- The clothUnbleached muslin or a well-washed cotton square, scalded and wrung out, then floured on the inside so the rice releases. Leave slack when you tie: the rice swells. Small heatproof cups or a muffin tin covered with foil will do the same job if you have no cloth.
- Use sticky riceThe recipe depends on the rice cohering into a casing. Short-grain or pudding rice boiled soft in milk or water works; long-grain will not hold together. "Hot boiled rice" means still warm and pliable, since cold rice will not mould round the fruit.
- Choice of appleA firm cooking apple that holds its shape is wanted here, not a Bramley that collapses to froth. Peel it, or the skin will separate from the flesh inside the rice and leave a gap.
- Filling the cored appleNuts alone are dry. Sugar, a little butter, and a spice such as cinnamon or a clove in the cavity would suit, and chopped walnuts with brown sugar is one plausible reading, but the recipe specifies only nuts.
- Forty minutesThat is right for a medium apple, cored and whole, in full steam. A very large apple wants closer to an hour. Test by pressing through the cloth, the apple should give completely.
- Yield and servingOne square per person, unmoulded straight from the cloth onto a warm plate. A sweet hard sauce, cream, or a thin custard would suit, though the recipe says nothing about serving.
Apple snowballs belong to a large family of English and American cloth puddings in which a whole apple is wrapped in something starchy and boiled: suet crust, short paste, or, as here, rice. The name is generally traced to the appearance, a plain white sphere turned out of the cloth, and the same title seems to have been used in the nineteenth century for both the rice version and one made with a pale suet crust. Rice-cased fruit puddings were a thrift dish and a nursery dish at once, cheaper than pastry, and they appear often in invalid cookery and children's menus of the period. Their place in a book of fruit recipes reflects a moment when the apple was the year-round domestic fruit, worked into every course, and when a pudding cloth was still standard kitchen equipment rather than a curiosity.