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Dessert

Rice Fruit Tarts

Rice fruit tarts are baked pastries made with boiled rice, sweetened fruit, and frothy egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rice Fruit Tarts

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the crust

  1. Boil the rice in milk until perfectly soft.

  2. Sweeten the rice with white sugar and let it cool.

  3. Line a dish with the cooled rice.

Fill and bake

  1. Fill the dish with the stewed and sweetened fruit.

  2. Beat the egg whites with 2 teaspoons of sugar until frothy.

  3. Spread the egg mixture over the top of the fruit.

  4. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for half an hour.

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 + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  2. Currant + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes
  5. Rice + curranttop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together497 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Sugar and currant barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Whole rice
Cooked soft and pressed into a dish, it forms the base that holds the fruit.
Egg whites
Beaten until frothy, they set in the oven to form a light topping over the fruit.
White sugar
Sweetens the rice and the egg white topping.
Fruit
Provides the main flavour and moisture in the filling.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites until frothy. Egg whites trap air when beaten, and that foam gives the topping its lightness. If they are under-beaten, the topping stays flat and dense after baking.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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