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Rice Dumplings

Rice dumplings made by cooking rice with milk, then wrapping apples in the rice and boiling until soft.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rice Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Combine rice and milk in a stew-pan and heat gently without boiling.

  2. Once the rice absorbs the milk, peel the apples and remove the cores.

Assemble and cook

  1. Surround each apple with rice instead of dough.

  2. Tie them in cloths for cooking.

  3. Boil the dumplings until the apples are soft.

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

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

  2. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the outer wrapper that encloses each apple in place of dough.
Milk
Moistens the rice and softens its starch as it is heated gently.
Apples
Form the soft filling at the centre of each dumpling.

The step that matters

Heat the rice and milk gently without boiling. Boiling milk can scorch on the base of the pan and cause it to boil over. Gentle heat lets the rice absorb the liquid evenly and become a cohesive mass that can wrap the apples.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk. 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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