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Apricot Dumplings

A sweet dumpling made with boiled rice and apricots, simmered and served with sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and apricot work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 353 recipes. Both carry gamma-undecalactone, which smells peach, sweet. The science ↓

Apricot Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare a saucepan with a broad base.

  2. Fill it with boiling water to a depth of 2 inches and keep it simmering.

  3. Wring out 6 dumpling cloths from hot water.

Assemble the dumplings

  1. Place ½ cup of boiled rice on each cloth, spreading it out slightly.

  2. In the center of the rice, place 2 halves of cooked apricot.

  3. Optionally, add a blanched almond between them.

  4. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon of sugar over the apricots.

  5. Gather the cloth to enclose the fruit in the rice. Tie it securely.

Cook and serve

  1. Drop the dumplings into the simmering water.

  2. Cook for 10 minutes.

  3. Remove the dumplings and turn them out onto a plate.

  4. Serve with Jam Sauce, Hard Sauce, or Dairy Maids' Sauce.

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 + apricottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together353 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

  2. Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Hot boiled rice
Forms the outer starchy wrapping that holds the fruit and keeps the dumpling together.
Cooked apricots
Provide the sweet, soft fruit filling at the center of each dumpling.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the apricots as they soften during cooking.

The step that matters

Gather and tie the cloth securely. If the cloth is loose or the tie fails, rice can separate and water can enter during simmering, so the dumpling may fall apart or become waterlogged.

Swap the apricot

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, sugar. 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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