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Dessert

Meringue Rice Pudding

A sweet rice pudding with lemon rind, butter, and egg yolks, topped with a lemon-flavored meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Meringue Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the rice until soft in the milk.

  2. Add the butter, egg yolks, and grated lemon rind.

  3. Bake for 20 minutes at 350°F (175°C).

Top and finish

  1. Beat the egg whites to a strong froth with the sugar, then add the lemon juice.

  2. Spread the meringue over the pudding and return it to the oven to harden and brown lightly.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

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

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

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  5. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Cooked soft in milk to form the body of the pudding.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set into a tender texture when baked.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar to form a stable foam that becomes the browned topping.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to create the creamy base of the pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender mouthfeel to the pudding.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet pudding and meringue.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites to a strong froth. Egg whites need to be whipped until they hold stiff, glossy peaks, because the air trapped in the foam is what makes the meringue light. Under-whipped whites deflate and weep, and adding the lemon juice and sugar at the right stage helps the foam stay stable.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, egg, butter, 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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