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Rice Meringue

A custard-like rice pudding topped with baked meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Rice Meringue

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the cold boiled rice.

  3. Beat the egg yolks with ⅓ cup sugar and add to the milk and rice mixture.

  4. Place the mixture in a double boiler and cook until thick like soft custard.

  5. Add the grated lemon rind and pour into a buttered dish.

Top and bake

  1. Beat the egg whites with ⅔ cup sugar and add the lemon juice.

  2. Spread the meringue over the pudding.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until brown.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the rice and egg yolks set into a creamy pudding.
Cold boiled rice
Provides the body and bulk of the pudding.
Egg yolks
Thicken the milk into a soft custard as they cook.
Egg whites
Whip into the meringue that gives a light, airy topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and stabilises the meringue.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard in the double boiler. Egg yolks thicken only gently with indirect heat. Overheating or rushing can scramble them into lumps, so cook slowly until the mixture coats a spoon.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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