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Chicken and Rice Pudding

A savory pudding of cooked chicken, ham, rice, and milk simmered in stock and served with sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Chicken and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,769 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Chicken and Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pound the ham with salt, white pepper, and mace in a mortar.

  2. Boil the rice in chicken stock until cooked, then drain.

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the rice with the milk and pounded meat until well combined.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a buttered mold and dust the top with flour.

  3. Tie the mold in a floured cloth and boil for 1 hour, ensuring water doesn't reach the top of the mold.

Serve

  1. Serve with mushroom or oyster 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.

  1. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  4. White pepper + macetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Absorbs stock and milk to give the pudding its soft, bound body.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, helping the rice and meat set into a tender mass.
Ham
Pounded into a paste, it adds savory flavor and helps bind the mixture.
Cooked chicken
Provides the main protein and meaty texture of the pudding.

The step that matters

Keep water below the top of the mold. If boiling water reaches the mold's top, it can seep into the pudding and make it watery, so the mold must stay sealed and partly out of the water.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, ham, mace, rice, milk, flour, butter):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, ham, mace, rice, milk, flour, 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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