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Dessert

Rice Lemon Pudding

A lemon-flavored pudding made with rice flour, milk, butter, eggs, and lemon zest and juice.

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

Rice Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil 1 quart of milk in a pot.

  2. When it simmers, stir in 4 tablespoons of rice flour that has been moistened in a little milk.

  3. Let it come to a boil, then remove from heat.

  4. Add ¼ pound of butter and let it cool.

  5. Stir in the grated peel and juice of 2 lemons.

  6. Add 4 egg yolks and the beaten egg whites.

  7. Sweeten to taste and mix in ⅓ cup of wine if desired.

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. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Rice flour
Thickens the milk into a soft, spoonable pudding as it cooks.
Egg yolks
Enrich the pudding and add richness and body as it sets.
Egg whites
Add lightness and airiness to the pudding's texture.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright citrus flavour that balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Stir in the rice flour gradually. Rice flour clumps if added dry or too fast to hot milk. Moistening it in a little milk first lets it disperse evenly so the starch thickens the pudding smoothly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, rice, flour, butter, egg, sugar, wine. 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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