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Dessert

Apple Rice Pudding

A sweet dish of boiled rice served with tart apples, cooked in salted water and finished with cream or pudding sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Apple Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Boil 2 quarts of salted water in a large pot.

  2. Add 1 cup of thoroughly washed rice.

  3. Boil the rice for 15 minutes.

  4. Drain the rice.

Wrap and boil

  1. Spread the rice on a square of cheesecloth, about ½ inch thick and the size of a dinner plate.

  2. Pare, core, and quarter 4 tart apples.

  3. Sprinkle the apples with sugar.

  4. Place the apples in the center of the rice.

  5. Gather the ends of the cheesecloth to cover the apples and tie tightly.

  6. Boil the wrapped rice and apples in a large kettle of boiling water for 1 hour.

  7. Carefully remove from the water.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with cream or pudding sauce.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Rice + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,311 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Rice + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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
Forms the pudding's starchy outer case that holds the apples together while cooking.
Tart apples
Provide the fruity, slightly acidic filling that contrasts with the sweet, mild rice.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps bring out their flavor as they cook.

The step that matters

Tie the cheesecloth tightly. A loose wrap lets rice wash off or break apart in the boiling water, exposing the apples and leaving the pudding without its shape.

Swap the apple

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

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

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