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Dessert

Rice Blancmange

A sweet milk-based dessert made with ground rice, sugar, and lemon peel, set in a mold and served with jam or custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and rice 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 ↓

Rice Blancmange

Ingredients

Directions

Make the blancmange

  1. Boil the milk with a strip of lemon peel.

  2. Mix the ground rice in a spoonful of cold milk and pour it into the boiling milk.

  3. Stir until it boils, then let it boil for 2-3 minutes.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a mold that has been dipped in cold water and let it stand until firm.

  2. Turn out the set dessert when cold and serve with jam, stewed fruit, or custard sauce.

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 + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Ground rice
Its starch thickens the hot milk and sets the dessert as it cools.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the ground rice thickens into a creamy set dessert.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the milk base.

The step that matters

Stirring the ground rice into the boiling milk. Ground rice lumps if dropped in dry or unmixed, so it must first be blended smoothly into cold milk. Then, once it boils, the starch swells and thickens the liquid. Boiling for the stated time cooks out the raw starch taste and gives a firm set.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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