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Dessert

Steamed Ground Rice Pudding

A steamed pudding made with ground rice, raisins, flour, suet, brown sugar, milk, baking soda, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Steamed Ground Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix the ground rice, chopped raisins, flour, suet, brown sugar, baking soda, and salt in a bowl.

  2. Add the milk to the dry mixture, ensuring it is very moist.

Steam

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased tin and cover with greased paper.

  2. Steam for 3 hours.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  3. Rice + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Ground rice
Provides the main body and a soft, starchy texture as it cooks.
Flour
Adds structure so the pudding holds together after steaming.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and tender.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a molasses-like depth of flavour.
Baking soda
Reacts with the moist batter to help it rise and lighten.
Milk
Supplies the moisture that hydrates the flour and rice into a pudding.

The step that matters

Adding the milk. The mixture must be very moist, because dry batter will stay stiff and dense during steaming. Starch in the ground rice and flour needs enough liquid to swell and set into a tender, cohesive pudding.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Coconutfits less well
  4. Figfits less well

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