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Dessert

Apple and Rice

A sweet dish of stewed apples and rice cooked in milk, served with cream or custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Apple and Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apple

  1. Peel and cut the apple in half, removing the core.

  2. In an enamelled saucepan, melt the butter and add the apple halves.

  3. Sprinkle crushed loaf sugar and grated lemon rind over the apple.

  4. Stew the apple gently until soft, being careful not to break it.

Cook the rice

  1. In a separate pot, boil the rice in milk with a little sugar until soft.

Serve

  1. Place the rice on a dish with the stewed apple in the center.

  2. Serve with cream or boiled custard.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Apple
Softens into the main body of the dish and gives its fruity flavour.
Rice
Swells and softens in the milk, thickening the dish into a porridge.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to create the creamy, soft porridge texture.
Butter
Fat that carries flavour and helps the apple soften in the pan.

The step that matters

Stew the apple gently until soft. High heat or vigorous stirring can break the apple apart before it is tender. Gentle heat softens the fruit's cell walls evenly so the halves hold their shape.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, rice, butter, milk, sugar, cream. 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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