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Surprise Pudding

A rice pudding layered with strawberry or raspberry jam and topped with a jam sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,147 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Surprise Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Boil the rice until tender, then sweeten it.

Layer the pudding

  1. Layer the rice in a neat round shape in the center of a dish.

  2. Spread a little jam on top of the rice layer.

  3. Repeat layering with rice and jam until all ingredients are used.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, stir a few tablespoons of the same jam into a small pot.

  2. Pour the sauce over the pudding and serve warm.

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. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Rice + strawberrytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together136 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Sugar + strawberrytop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,060 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Rice + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,396 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the bulk of the pudding and gives it a soft, tender body.
Strawberry or raspberry jam
Adds fruity sweetness and moisture between the rice layers.
Sugar
Sweetens the cooked rice to balance the tart fruit flavour.

The step that matters

Boil the rice until tender. Rice that is still firm will not hold a neat layered shape and stays grainy. Fully cooked rice is soft and sticky enough to bind into layers and absorb the jam's moisture.

Swap the strawberry

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Strawberrythe original

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