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Rice and Pears

A simple dish of cooked rice topped with canned pears and tart jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and bartlett pear work together. They rank in the top 38% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4 recipes. Both carry 3-methylbutanol, which smells malty, whiskey. The science ↓

Rice and Pears

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rice until the white powder is gone.

Cook and season

  1. Cook the rice until soft and dry, ensuring it does not stick.

  2. Season the rice with coarse sea salt.

Serve

  1. Place hot rice in a dish.

  2. Top the rice with half of a canned Bartlett pear and a small portion of tart jelly.

  3. Serve each portion separately.

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 + bartlett peartop 38% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-methylbutanol (malty, whiskey).

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; cooking it until soft and dry gives it its main texture.
Canned bartlett pear
Adds sweetness and soft fruit texture against the plain rice.
Tart jelly
Adds acidity and a sharp contrast to the sweet pear and starchy rice.

The step that matters

Cook the rice until soft and dry, ensuring it does not stick. Rice that is undercooked stays firm, and rice that is wet or left to stick becomes gummy. Cooking until the grains are tender and the surface dry gives a clean, separate texture that holds under the toppings.

“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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