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Dessert

Surprise Pudding

A rice pudding layered with jam and topped with a jam‑sugar sauce, served warm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and strawberry work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 136 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Surprise Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Boil the rice in water until tender.

  2. Sweeten the rice.

Assemble and serve

  1. Layer the rice in a round dish, adding a layer of jam between each layer of rice.

  2. Make a sauce by stirring a few tablespoons of jam into water and sugar to taste.

  3. Pour the sauce over the pudding.

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

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

  2. Strawberry + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,060 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. 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 sets into a soft, tender body as it cooks.
Strawberry or raspberry jam
Adds sweetness, fruity acidity and aroma between the layers and in the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the rice and the sauce to taste.

Swap the strawberry

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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