Name: Rice Plum Pudding
Ingredients: ½ pound rice; ½ pound raisins; ½ teaspoon salt

Why it works: Rice and raisin work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 565 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Rice Plum Pudding

Ingredients

½ pound rice
½ pound raisins
½ teaspoon salt

Directions

Tie the rice and raisins with salt in a cloth.
Boil in water for 2.5 hours.
Serve with sweet 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.

Rice + raisintop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together565 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 sets into a soft, starchy body as it cooks.
Raisins: Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pudding.

“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.