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Fruit Snowballs
Use recipe for making Snow Puffs. When done, sprinkle with powdered sugar and garnish with cherry sauce. one cup rice
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it borrows its method wholesale from the book's Snow Puffs and adds only a finish. The stray "one cup rice" at the end is almost certainly a compositor's fragment that drifted in from a neighbouring entry, since nothing in the instructions uses rice.
- You need the parent recipeNothing here works without Snow Puffs. Find and read that entry first; this page supplies only the sugar and the sauce.
- The orphaned rice"One cup rice" has no instruction attached to it. It may be a stray fragment, or it may be the remnant of a rice-based snowball, of which there were many in the period; as printed it cannot be used. Ignore it, or if you want a genuine rice snowball, follow a separate boiled-rice mould recipe rather than trying to graft rice onto this one.
- Why "snowballs"The name appears to be purely visual: the puffs are dusted heavily with powdered sugar so they read as white and rounded. Sift the sugar over them at the last moment, since it dissolves into a damp surface within a few minutes.
- Cherry saucePeriod cherry sauce for puddings is stoned cherries cooked down with sugar and a little water, thickened lightly with cornstarch or arrowroot and often sharpened with lemon. Frozen sour cherries make a better version than sweet fresh ones; you want the acidity against the sugared exterior.
- Garnish, not floodThe original says garnish, and the plating logic depends on it. Pool the sauce around the base or spoon it at the side so the white dome stays white; sauce poured over the top erases the whole point of the dish.
- Yield and timingTiming -- Serve soon after the puffs are finished, while still warm and before the sugar melts. Have the sauce made and warm before the puffs are ready.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that, like Walter Baker & Co., issued cookbooks as advertising — the chocolate recipes sat inside several hundred pages of ordinary household cookery. Entries like this one show how such books were assembled: a base recipe was written once and then spun into a family of named desserts by changing the sauce and the garnish. "Snowball" was a stock nineteenth-century dessert name applied to a range of white, domed sweets — steamed puddings, moulded rice, sugared cake, even boiled apples in crust — and it worked largely as a description of the plating rather than of any fixed ingredient. The stray "one cup rice" trailing off the end of the entry is unexplained.