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Rice Cakes

Rice Cakes are made from boiled rice mixed with milk, eggs, and flour, then fried and served with nutmeg and sugar.

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 ↓

Rice Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Boil the rice until very soft and then mash it finely.

  2. Add the milk and eggs to the mashed rice and mix well.

  3. Stir in enough flour to achieve a batter-like consistency.

Cook and serve

  1. Butter a griddle and pour small amounts of the batter to form cakes.

  2. Serve the cakes with a sprinkle of nutmeg and fine sugar.

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. 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the bulk of the batter, giving the cakes their body and soft texture once mashed.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help set the cakes as they cook.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the mashed rice into a pourable batter.
Flour
Thickens the batter and gives the cakes enough structure to hold their shape.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour. Flour should be added only until the batter reaches a pourable consistency. Too much makes the cakes dense and stiff, while too little leaves them loose and unable to hold their shape on the griddle.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Turmericfits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

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