Name: Ground Rice Pudding
Ingredients: one pint of milk; quarter pound of ground rice; two ounces of sugar; a small piece of lemon peel; half pint of milk; two eggs

Why it works: Milk and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 7,354 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Boil one pint of milk with a small piece of lemon peel. Mix quarter pound of ground rice with half pint of milk, two ounces of sugar, and one of butter. Add this to the boiling milk. Keep stirring constantly. Take it off the fire, break in two eggs and continue stirring. Then butter a pie dish, pour in the mixture, and bake until done.

By Gibson, Marietta Fauntleroy Hollyday, "Mrs. C. H. Gibson.". 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. See the original page.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Milk + ricetop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together7,354 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Rice + lemontop 7% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together4,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).
Milk + lemontop 7% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together19,048 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Milk + eggtop 9% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together88,465 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Lemon + eggtop 9% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together43,327 recipes

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

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

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

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

Vanillabetter flavor fit
Coconutbetter flavor fit
Figabout as good a flavor fit
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, rice, sugar, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).