Name: Another Rice Pudding
Ingredients: ½ pound rice; ½ pound raisins; Sweet sauce (for serving)

Why it works: Rice and raisin work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 565 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Another Rice Pudding

Ingredients

½ pound rice
½ pound raisins
Sweet sauce (for serving)

Directions

Place the rice and raisins in a cloth bag.
Boil the bag in water for 2.5 hours.
Serve with sweet sauce.

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.

Rice + raisintop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together565 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Rice + saucetop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,396 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Raisin + saucetop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together297 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 its starch thickens and sets during long cooking.
Raisins: Add sweetness and chewy texture, and soften as they cook in the bag.