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Dessert

Ground Rice Pudding

A sweet pudding made from ground rice cooked in milk, flavored with lemon peel, cinnamon, nutmeg, and sugar, then baked with puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Ground Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice filling

  1. Boil the ground rice in the milk with lemon peel and cinnamon until thick.

  2. Let it cool, then stir in sugar, nutmeg, and beaten eggs.

Bake

  1. Line a dish with puff pastry, pour in the rice mixture, and bake until golden.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

Ground rice
Thickens the milk as it boils, giving the pudding its body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the rice swells in and the eggs set into.
Eggs
Set the cooled mixture into a soft custard and bind it together.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the pudding.
Puff pastry
Forms a crisp, golden base that holds the rice mixture.

The step that matters

Let the rice mixture cool before adding the eggs. Hot liquid can scramble beaten eggs into lumps. Cooling the mixture first lets the eggs blend smoothly and set into an even custard when baked.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

More rice pudding recipes

Baked 88Apple 84with Meringue 40Boiled 38French 30Lemon 29 See all 1,220 →

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