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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 built on two easy components, both of which depend on temperature control. The custard is the part that can go wrong.
- The hinge: custard heatThree yolks thickened with a teaspoon of cornstarch will set between about 170 and 180F. Stir constantly over low heat or a water bath and pull it the moment it coats the spoon; a hard boil scrambles the yolks even with starch present.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, as distinguished from sour or buttermilk in period writing. Whole milk gives the right body; skim makes a thin sauce.
- No sugar is listedThe recipe omits it, which may well be an oversight, since boiled custards of the period are normally sweetened. Three to four tablespoons of sugar whisked into the yolks before tempering brings it in line with other boiled custards of the period.
- Rice quantity and typeOne pint of raw rice is about two cups and will absorb far more than the finished dish suggests. Use a short- or medium-grain rice; long-grain stays too separate to mold and the balls collapse when turned out.
- Cooking the rice softTwo quarts of water to two cups of rice is a generous, pasta-style boil. Drain it when the grains are fully tender and slightly broken down, since the starch is what holds the shape.
- Molding in cupsPack the hot rice firmly into small teacups or ramekins, level the tops, and chill until cold and firm, at least two hours. Run a knife around the edge and invert onto the serving dish.
- Flavor with lemonEither a few drops of lemon extract or the zest of one lemon steeped in the warm milk and strained out. Lemon juice will curdle the milk; keep it to zest or extract.
- The half hour mattersPouring the custard over too early softens the outside of the balls into mush. Thirty minutes is enough for the sauce to soak the surface while the centers hold.
- YieldDepending on cup size, eight to ten portions.
Molded rice desserts were everywhere in nineteenth-century cookery, sitting somewhere between nursery food and dinner-party dish: cheap, filling, and capable of being dressed up with custard, preserves or whipped cream. The "snow ball" name attaches to a whole family of white domed puddings, some rice, some suet dough boiled in a cloth, some apple wrapped in pastry, all named for shape and color rather than any shared method. The grander French relative, riz, works custard and cream into the rice itself; this version keeps the two separate, which is what makes it, as Miss Skinner says, simple. Rice appears freely in The Dixie Cook Book. The contributor's name printed beneath the recipe is typical of the book's construction: compiled community recipes, credited, with the terse authority of a cook who assumed her reader already knew what a boiled custard should look like.