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Dessert

Rice Pears

Rice Pears are shaped rice desserts baked with a flour batter, served with custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rice Pears

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the rice mixture

  1. Boil the rice in milk until tender.

  2. Mix in the beaten eggs, sugar, and jelly until thick.

  3. Shape the mixture into pear forms.

Coat and bake

  1. Prepare a batter with flour and an egg.

  2. Dip the pear shapes in the batter.

  3. Sprinkle with sifted sugar.

  4. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until golden brown.

  5. Insert a piece of citron in each pear for a stem.

Serve

  1. Serve with custard.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Rice + orangetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rice
Cooked in milk, it softens and thickens to give the pears their body.
Eggs
Beaten in, they set when heated and bind the mixture into a firm shape.
Milk
Cooks with the rice, adding moisture and a soft, creamy texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown in the oven.
Flour
Forms the batter coating that becomes golden and crisp when baked.

The step that matters

Shape the mixture into pear forms. The mixture must be thick enough to hold its shape before coating. Cooking the rice until tender and mixing until thick gives it the body needed to keep its form in the batter and oven.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, milk, egg, sugar, flour):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, egg, sugar, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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