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Dessert

White Mountain Pudding

A rice pudding layered with apple sauce, butter, sugar, and nutmeg, baked until pale yellow.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon 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 ↓

White Mountain Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA rather quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Boil rice with boiling water and salt for 5 minutes.

  2. Steam until tender, about 30 minutes.

  3. Add sugar and nutmeg.

Layer and bake

  1. In a buttered pudding dish, layer rice and apple sauce, dotting with butter.

  2. Continue layering until the dish is filled, with apple sauce on top.

  3. Bake in the oven until pale yellow.

Serve

  1. Serve hot or cold with soft custard.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Nutmeg + appletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Rice + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,311 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 until tender, it forms the soft, starchy body of the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown lightly during baking.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the top brown as it bakes.
Apple sauce
Adds moisture and fruity acidity that balances the sweet, mild rice.

The step that matters

Steam the rice until fully tender. Rice that is undercooked stays firm and grainy in the baked pudding. Cooking it until the grains are fully soft lets them absorb liquid and blend into a creamy texture.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, sugar, nutmeg, butter, sauce, lemon):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, sugar, nutmeg, butter, sauce, lemon. 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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