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Dessert

Rice Apples

A baked apple dessert with rice pudding, topped with sugared egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and rice 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 Apples

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Combine the milk and rice in a double boiler and cook for 40 minutes or until tender.

  2. Meanwhile, peel and core the apples, filling their centers with currants or raisins.

Bake the apples and pudding

  1. Place the apples in a pudding dish, squeeze lemon juice over them, add a little water, and bake until tender but not broken.

  2. Once the rice is ready, arrange it around the apples, leaving the tops uncovered, and return to the oven, covered, for 20 minutes.

  3. Uncover, spread the beaten egg whites mixed with sugar on top, and brown slightly.

Serve

  1. Serve in the baking dish with cream and sugar, or with stewed or canned raspberries, blackberries, or cherries.

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. Milk + ricetop 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 + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

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

  4. Currant + appletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. 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
Cooks into a tender, starchy base that gives the pudding its body.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to create a creamy, soft texture.
Tart apples
Hold their shape when baked and add a bright, tangy contrast to the sweet pudding.
Egg whites
Beaten with sugar and browned on top, they form a light, set meringue topping.
Currants or seedless raisins
Add small pockets of sweetness inside the apples as they bake.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and helps keep the apples' color fresh.

The step that matters

Bake the apples until tender but not broken. Apples baked too long collapse and turn mushy, while underbaked apples stay hard. Keeping the cores intact and checking firmness helps the fruit hold its shape while softening enough to eat.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, rice, apple, egg, sugar, lemon. 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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