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Dessert

Troche Pudding

A rice pudding flavored with citrus zest and topped with a browned meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Troche Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the pudding

  1. Steam the rice in the milk until cooked.

  2. Add salt, sugar, and orange or lemon zest to taste.

  3. Allow the mixture to cool.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg yolks.

  5. Transfer to a baking dish and bake slowly at 300°F (150°C) for about 30 minutes.

Top with meringue

  1. Whip the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Mix in ½ cup sugar.

  2. Spread the meringue on top of the pudding.

  3. Brown it under the broiler.

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

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

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

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

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Rice
Cooks in the milk to form the thick, soft body of the pudding.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the rice absorbs and that sets into a creamy custard.
Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the pudding, while whipped whites form the light meringue topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and stabilizes the whipped egg whites in the meringue.

The step that matters

Allow the mixture to cool before folding in the egg yolks. Adding beaten yolks to very hot rice and milk can scramble them into lumps. Letting the mixture cool first lets the yolks blend in smoothly and thicken gently during baking.

Swap the orange

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

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

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