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Dessert

A Rice Cake, Glazed and Ornamented

A rice cake glazed with apricot marmalade and decorated with pistachios, angelica, currants, and verjus grapes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Vanilla and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 608 recipes. Both carry 4-methoxybenzaldehyde, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓

A Rice Cake, Glazed and Ornamented

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice cake

  1. Boil the rice as usual and add the clove of vanilla.

  2. Lightly butter a semi-globular mold and fill it with the rice mixture.

  3. Turn the mold onto a dish and let it cool.

Finish and decorate

  1. Once cooled, cover the rice cake with transparent apricot marmalade.

  2. Decorate the top and sides with pistachios, angelica, currants, and verjus grapes.

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. Vanilla + apricottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together608 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  2. Pistachio + angelicatop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together36 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Apricot + grapetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together477 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Clove + angelicatop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together84 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Vanilla + angelicatop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the body of the cake, setting firm enough to hold its molded shape when cooled.
Apricot marmalade
Adds sweetness and a glossy glaze over the cake's surface.
Vanilla clove
Adds aroma that infuses the rice as it cooks.

The step that matters

Turning the mold onto a dish. The rice must be fully cooled before unmolding so it holds its shape; warm rice is soft and can slump or tear when turned out.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, clove, vanilla, apricot, pistachio, angelica, grape):

  1. Cherryfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, clove, vanilla, apricot, pistachio, angelica, grape. 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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