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Apples and Rice

A baked dish of rice and apples served with custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 and Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Boil milk with lemon rind for a few minutes.

  2. Remove the lemon peel.

  3. Add rice and enough sugar, boil gently until rice is soft.

  4. Let the rice cool.

Prepare the apples

  1. Peel, quarter, and core the apples.

  2. Boil the apples until tender in a syrup of sugar and water.

  3. Lift the apples to drain on a sieve.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place a medium-sized jar in the center of a dish and surround it with rice until the top of the jar is reached.

  2. Smooth the rice with the back of a spoon.

  3. Arrange the apples in rows on top.

  4. Bake in the oven to color the apples.

  5. Remove the jar.

  6. Garnish the rice with preserved fruits.

  7. Pour enough custard in the center to be level with the top of 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. Rice + milktop 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. Rice + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,311 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + appletop 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

Rice
Forms the soft pudding base that holds the shape of the mold.
Milk
Provides the liquid that cooks the rice into a creamy, tender pudding.
Apples
Add tender fruit texture and flavour, and brown lightly in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the rice and the apple syrup.
Boiled custard
Adds a smooth, rich layer that fills the centre of the pudding.

The step that matters

Boiling the apples in syrup until tender. Apples cooked too long turn mushy and lose their shape, while undercooked apples stay hard. Draining them well keeps excess syrup from thinning the pudding.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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