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Rice with Figs

Rice with figs is a sweet dish of cooked rice served with a thickened fig sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and fig match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 103 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Rice with Figs

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Soak and cook the rice according to package instructions.

  2. Wash the figs and stew them with sugar until soft.

  3. Serve a spoonful of the fig sauce with each dish of rice, ensuring the sauce is thick.

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 + figtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Sugar + figtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,241 recipes

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

  3. 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

Rice
Forms the starchy base of the dish, giving it bulk and a soft, tender texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the figs and helps them thicken into a syrupy sauce as they stew.
Figs
Provide the fruity flavour and, once softened, the body of the sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening the fig sauce. Stewing figs with sugar until soft lets their pectin and starch set the juices into a sauce. If it is stewed too briefly it stays thin and runs off the rice; overcooking can turn it dull and sticky.

Swap the fig

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Figthe 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.

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