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Dessert

Rice Pears

A sweet rice dessert shaped like pears, made with milk, butter, almonds, lemon peel, eggs, and breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,456 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Rice Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice base

  1. Boil the rice in milk until thick.

  2. Stir in butter and salt.

  3. Remove from heat and let cool in a dish.

Shape and bake

  1. Add chopped almonds, bitter almonds, lemon peel, sugar, beaten eggs, and bread crumbs.

  2. Shape the mixture into pears.

  3. Dip each pear in beaten egg and coat with bread crumbs.

  4. Bake until golden.

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 + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  5. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Cooked in milk until thick, it forms the starchy body that holds the pear shape.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and, as a dip, set into a coating that helps the pears brown.
Bread crumbs
Add dry structure to the mixture and form a crisp, golden outer coating.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to give a soft, creamy, thickened base.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer texture in the cooled mixture.
Almonds
Add nutty flavour and a bit of texture inside the pears.

The step that matters

Let the rice cool before shaping. Cooked rice that is still hot is soft and sticky and will not hold a pear shape well. Cooling lets the starch firm up so the mixture can be formed and coated without collapsing.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, butter, almond, sugar, egg, bread. 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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