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Dessert

Rice Pie

A custard-like pie made with milk, rice flour, eggs, lemon, and optional Madeira wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Rice Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Boil 1 pint of milk.

  2. In a bowl, mix 1 pint of cold milk with 3 heaping tablespoons of rice flour until smooth.

  3. Stir in 4 beaten eggs and flavor with lemon extract or boiled lemon peel.

  4. Pour the mixture into the boiling milk and sweeten to taste.

  5. Let it cool, then add ⅓ cup of Madeira wine if desired and some nutmeg.

Fill and finish

  1. Line pie dishes with pie paste and fill with the mixture, finishing as you would a pumpkin pie.

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

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

  2. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Rice + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice flour
Starch that thickens the milk mixture into a smooth, sliceable custard when heated.
Eggs
Proteins that set on heating, giving the filling body and structure.
Milk
Forms the liquid base, adding richness and creaminess to the filling.
Pie paste
Forms the crust that holds the filling in its dish.

The step that matters

Pouring the smooth mixture into the boiling milk. Rice flour starch swells and thickens when heated in liquid. If the cold flour mixture is not fully smooth before it goes in, lumps form and the custard thickens unevenly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, rice, flour, egg, sugar, madeira wine, nutmeg. 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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