Name: Fruit Rice Pudding
Ingredients: 1 large teacup of rice; water (to cook rice partially); pared, cored, and quartered apples or any fruit of your choice

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 ↓

Fruit Rice Pudding

Ingredients

1 large teacup of rice
water (to cook rice partially)
pared, cored, and quartered apples or any fruit of your choice

Directions

Prepare

Partially cook the rice with a little water.

Assemble

Line an earthen basin with part of the rice.
Fill the basin nearly full with the prepared fruit.
Cover the fruit with the remaining rice.

Steam and serve

Tie a cloth tightly over the top and steam for one hour.
Serve with sweet 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.

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 layers and body of the pudding as it cooks and sets.
Apples: Provides moisture, natural sweetness and fruity flavour inside the pudding.

“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.