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Dessert

Apples with Rice

A baked dessert of stewed apples served over tender rice, finished with a light brown crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Apples with Rice

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the apples

  1. Peel and core the apples without dividing them.

Make the syrup and stew the apples

  1. In a saucepan, combine sugar and lemon juice with water to make a syrup.

  2. Add the apples to the syrup and stew until tender.

Cook the rice

  1. In another saucepan, add rice and milk, and let the rice swell until tender.

  2. Remove the lemon peel from the rice.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the rice on a serving dish and arrange the apples on top.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until lightly browned.

  3. Serve warm with a sprinkle of sugar on each apple.

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. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

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

  4. Apple + ricetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,311 recipes

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

  5. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 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

Apples
Hold their shape while stewing and provide the fruity base of the dish.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and the finished apples, and helps the apples brown in the oven.
Rice
Swells in milk to form the creamy, tender base the apples rest on.
Milk
Cooks into the rice, adding moisture, richness and a soft, creamy texture.
Lemon
Its juice adds acidity to the syrup that balances the sweetness of the apples.

The step that matters

Stew the apples until tender. Apples stewed in syrup must cook through without falling apart. Stopping too early leaves them firm, while overcooking makes them mushy and hard to arrange on the rice.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, 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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