Why it works: Rice and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,396 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓
Boiled Rice Pudding
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Wash the rice in water.
Scald a pudding bag that allows the rice to swell to three times its size.
Place the rice in the bag and tie it securely.
Cook and serve
Put the bag in a saucepan of cold water.
Bring the water to a boil slowly and boil for 1.5 hours.
Serve with sweet sauce, cream and sugar, or syrup of preserved fruit.
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.
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Rice + saucetop 20% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together2,396 recipes
Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Rice
- Swells and softens during long boiling, becoming the tender body of the pudding.
The step that matters
Leave room in the pudding bag for the rice to swell. Rice absorbs water and can roughly triple in size as it cooks. A bag that is too small can burst or squeeze the grains, so it must be scalded and loosely sized before the rice goes in.
“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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