Skip to main content
Dessert

Rock Cream

A rice pudding topped with a frothy, flavored egg white and cream mixture that forms a rock-like layer.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rice and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rock Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice

  1. Boil the rice in new milk until soft.

  2. Sweeten the milk with powdered sugar.

Assemble and serve

  1. Pile the rice onto a dish.

  2. Add square lumps of currant jelly or preserved fruit on top.

  3. Beat the egg whites to a stiff froth with powdered sugar and flavor with orange-flower water or vanilla.

  4. When beaten stiff, fold in the rich cream.

  5. Drop the mixture over the rice to form a snow-like rock.

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

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

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

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

  3. Rice + orangetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Currant + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,034 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Milk + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Cooked in milk until soft, it forms the creamy base of the dish.
Egg whites
Beaten to a stiff froth, they give the topping its light, snow-like structure.
Rich cream
Folded into the beaten whites, it adds richness and softens the foam.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the beaten egg whites and helps them hold a stable foam.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites to a stiff froth. Whites must be beaten until stiff so the foam can hold its shape. Under-beaten whites collapse, and over-beaten whites turn dry and grainy, so the topping loses its snow-like form.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, sugar, egg, orange, cream. 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesRice CakeRice Cake120 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipes