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Dessert

Portuguese Sweet Rice

A sweet rice dish cooked with milk, sugar, eggs, cream, and flavored with cinnamon or burnt almond dust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Laurel and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 691 recipes. Both carry cinnamyl acetate, which smells sweet aromatic, cinnamon. The science ↓

Portuguese Sweet Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Wash the rice.

  2. Boil the rice in the milk with the sugar and laurel leaf until soft, about 1.5 hours.

  3. Remove the laurel leaf.

  4. Let the rice sit off the heat for 5 minutes.

Finish the custard

  1. Gradually stir in the beaten eggs and thick cream.

  2. Heat the mixture until it reaches boiling.

  3. Let it cool, stirring occasionally.

Chill and serve

  1. Transfer the mixture to a glass dish or pie dish and refrigerate for 2 hours.

  2. Before serving, sift powdered cinnamon or burnt almond dust over the surface.

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. Laurel + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together691 recipes

    Shared aroma: cinnamyl acetate (sweet aromatic, cinnamon).

  2. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Softens as it simmers in milk, giving the dish its body and thick texture.
Eggs
Thicken the mixture as they set with heat, giving a custard-like texture.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to form a creamy base and adds moisture.
Thick cream
Adds richness and fat, producing a smoother, silkier texture.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the dish and helps soften the rice as it cooks.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs and cream. Stir the beaten eggs in gradually, off the heat, so they blend evenly. Adding them too fast can scramble the eggs into lumps, while heating them carefully lets the mixture thicken smoothly.

“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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