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Dessert

Eice Meringue

A custard-like pudding made from milk, cooked rice, sugar, lemon, and topped with browned meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Eice Meringue

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Beat the egg yolks with 1 cup of sugar.

  2. Add the mixture to the milk and rice.

  3. Cook until thick like soft custard.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in grated lemon rind.

Top and brown

  1. Pour into a buttered pudding dish.

  2. Spread beaten egg whites mixed with remaining sugar and lemon juice on top.

  3. Brown in the oven.

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

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

  2. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  5. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into a soft custard when cooked gently.
Cooked rice
Adds body and a soft, pudding-like texture to the custard.
Egg whites
Beaten to a foam, they make an airy topping that sets and browns in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps the beaten egg whites hold their foam.
Lemon
Grated rind adds aroma, and juice adds bright acidity to the topping.

The step that matters

Cook the custard until thick. Egg yolks thicken gently as they heat. Cooking too hot or too long can scramble them, leaving a grainy custard, so heat slowly and stir.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk, rice, butter, 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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