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Dessert

A George Pudding

A baked pudding of rice, apples, wine, and citrus, topped with a wine‑egg yolk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

A George Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Boil the rice in milk with the lemon peel until tender, then drain.

  2. Mix the drained rice with the boiled apples, white wine, egg yolks, orange, citron, and sugar.

  3. Beat the egg whites until very frothy, then mix them with the other ingredients.

Bake and serve

  1. Line a mold or bowl with pastry.

  2. Fill the bowl and bake until brown.

  3. For the sauce, combine white wine, sugar, egg yolks, and butter in a saucepan, then simmer without boiling, stirring until thickened.

  4. Pour the sauce over the pudding.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  4. Apple + white winetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Lemon + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rice
Cooked until tender, it gives the pudding its body and soft, starchy structure.
Egg whites
Beaten until frothy, they trap air and help the pudding rise and turn light.
Egg yolks
Enrich the filling and help it set into a custard-like texture when baked.
Apples
Add moisture, tartness, and fruity flavour to the filling.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma, and in the sauce helps balance its richness.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the sauce, giving it a smooth, glossy finish.

The step that matters

Simmer the sauce without boiling. Egg yolks thicken when gently heated but scramble if they get too hot, leaving a grainy sauce instead of a smooth, thickened one.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, milk, lemon, white wine, egg, orange, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, lemon, white wine, egg, orange, sugar. 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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