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Rice and Apples

A baked dish of rice and apples cooked with syrup, milk, lemon, citron peel, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Syrup and sugar match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Rice and Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Core enough apples to fill a dish.

  2. Boil the apples in light syrup.

  3. Prepare the rice in milk with a little lemon, citron peel, sugar, and salt.

Assemble and finish

  1. Layer some rice in the dish, add the apples, and fill the gaps with more rice.

  2. Bake in the oven until golden brown or glaze it.

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. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

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

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

  4. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

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

  5. Apple + ricetop 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 bulk of the dish and, cooked in milk, gives a soft, creamy body that fills the gaps around the apples.
Apples
Provide the fruit base that holds their shape when boiled in syrup and gives the dish its main flavour.
Milk
Cooks the rice into a tender, creamy texture and adds moisture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown when the dish is baked.
Light syrup
Sweetens and moistens the apples as they cook.

The step that matters

Boil the apples in light syrup. Apples cooked too long turn mushy and lose their shape, while undercooked apples stay hard. Boiling gently until just tender keeps them intact through baking.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, syrup, rice, milk, 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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