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Dessert

Rice and Cocoa-nut Pudding

A pudding made by cooking rice in cocoa-nut water with sugar and aniseed, then baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and cocoa share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 93 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Rice and Cocoa-nut Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the coconut

  1. Pour boiling water over the desiccated cocoa-nut and cover the basin.

  2. Let it stand for at least 1 hour.

  3. Strain the cocoa-nut extract, discarding the dry residue.

Cook the rice

  1. Wash and pick the rice.

  2. Soak the rice in cold water until soft.

  3. Boil the rice in the cocoa-nut water until tender.

  4. Mix in the sugar and aniseed.

Bake

  1. Transfer to a well-buttered pudding dish.

  2. Bake for 20 minutes.

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 + cocoatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together93 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  2. Cocoa + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together548 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-undecalactone (coconut, creamy).

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

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

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. 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 body of the pudding as it softens and thickens in the liquid.
Desiccated cocoa-nut
Gives coconut flavour and richness through the extract steeped in boiling water.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the pudding its flavour.

Swap the cocoa

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Peanutfits better
  3. Sesamefits better
  4. Cocoathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, 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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