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Boiled Rice-dumplings

Boiled rice dumplings filled with apples and sweet or spiced filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,311 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled Rice-dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Pick over the rice and wash it in cold water.

  2. Boil the rice in 2 quarts of boiling water with 1 tablespoon of salt for 20 minutes.

  3. Drain the rice in a sieve.

Assemble the dumplings

  1. Peel and core the apples, then fill the centers with sugar and spice or jelly.

  2. Cover each apple with a layer of rice about ½ inch thick, ensuring they are completely covered.

  3. Tie each apple in a small pudding cloth.

Cook and serve

  1. Drop the dumplings into boiling water and boil for 1 hour.

  2. Carefully remove the cloths and serve the dumplings whole with a 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. Rice + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,311 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Rice + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,350 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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 a starchy coating that cooks into a tender, cohesive wrapper around each apple.
Apples
Provide the fruit filling, softening during boiling to become tender and sweet.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling taste rich as the apple cooks.
Jelly or marmalade
Adds sweetness and fruity flavour to the centre of each apple.

The step that matters

Covering each apple with rice. If the rice layer is thin or uneven, gaps let the apple burst or leak during the long boil, and the wrapper can fall apart. Even coverage keeps the dumpling intact.

Swap the apple

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

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

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