Name: Dried Fruit Pudding with Rice
Ingredients: 4 cups cold boiled rice; 2 cups sugar; 2 cups dried apricots, plums, pears, or peaches; 1 cup boiling water

Why it works: Rice and apricot work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 353 recipes. Both carry gamma-undecalactone, which smells peach, sweet. The science ↓

Dried Fruit Pudding with Rice

Ingredients

4 cups cold boiled rice
2 cups sugar
2 cups dried apricots, plums, pears, or peaches
1 cup boiling water

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Assemble

In a deep pudding dish, layer the cold boiled rice and dried fruit alternately.
Sprinkle each layer of fruit with sugar.
Pour the boiling water over the top.

Bake and serve

Cover the dish closely and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.
Serve with cream or milk.

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.

Rice + apricottop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together353 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).
Sugar + apricottop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,630 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,744 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold boiled rice: Forms the bulk of the pudding and absorbs moisture and sugar as it bakes.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and draws moisture out of the fruit, softening it into a syrup.
Dried fruit: Adds chewy texture, concentrated fruit flavour and some tartness.
Boiling water: Provides moisture that softens the rice and dried fruit during baking.

The step that matters

Cover the dish closely before baking. Covering traps steam so the rice and dried fruit soften evenly in the boiling water. Without a tight cover, the top dries out and the pudding can turn hard at the surface.

Swap the apricot

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

Vanillafits better
Coconutfits better
Raisinfits better
Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, sugar. 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.

Rice Cake120 recipes

Rice Cream43 recipes

Rice Jelly42 recipes

Apricot Ice Cream26 recipes

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Dried Fruit Pudding with Rice