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Rice Pudding, Boiled, Cheap

A boiled rice pudding served with sweet sauce, optionally with dried fruit or apples.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,396 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Rice Pudding, Boiled, Cheap

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rice and drain it.

  2. Place the rice in a dry pudding cloth, gather the ends, and tie loosely to allow for swelling.

Boil and serve

  1. Put the cloth into a saucepan with boiling water and keep it boiling until the rice is cooked, about 1 hour and 45 minutes. If needed, add more boiling water.

  2. Turn the pudding onto a dish and serve with sweet sauce poured around it.

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 + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,396 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Rice + curranttop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together497 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Sauce + curranttop 35% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together628 recipes

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, swelling as it absorbs water and cooks to a soft, set mass.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth loosely. Rice swells considerably as it absorbs water. A tight tie leaves no room for expansion, so the pudding can burst the cloth or cook unevenly.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, sauce):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, sauce. 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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