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Dessert

Rice with Apples in Syrup

A sweet rice pudding flavored with apples in syrup, milk, cream, butter, and optional lemon or vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and syrup 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 with Apples in Syrup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice

  1. Blanch the rice and boil it in milk until slightly thickened.

  2. Sweeten the rice after cooking.

  3. Add lemon or vanilla extract for flavor.

  4. Stir in cream and butter before serving.

Serve

  1. Dish the rice and surround it with apples in syrup, pouring the syrup over the rice.

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. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Starch that swells and thickens in the milk to form the pudding's creamy body.
Milk
Liquid that the rice absorbs and cooks in, giving the pudding its soft, creamy texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavor of the milk and rice.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety mouthfeel to the finished pudding.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a silkier texture in the finished pudding.

The step that matters

Boil the rice in milk until slightly thickened. Rice must simmer gently in the milk so the starch releases and the grains soften. Boiling too hard or too long can scorch the milk on the bottom of the pan or leave the pudding too stiff once it cools.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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