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Dessert

Rice Gems

A baked sweet rice cake made with boiled rice, sweet milk, sugar, butter, egg, flour, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 Gems

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C) and grease gem pans.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, cream together the melted butter and sugar.

  2. Add the beaten egg, then mix in the sweet milk, boiled rice, and salt. Stir well to combine all ingredients thoroughly.

  3. Sift the baking powder with a little flour, then add it to the mixture.

  4. Stir in more flour as needed to create a rather stiff batter.

Bake

  1. Spoon the batter into the prepared gem pans and bake for 30 minutes.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure as it sets in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, helping the cakes rise and become light.
Flour
Thickens the batter so it holds a stiff shape while baking.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown lightly in the oven.
Boiled rice
Adds body and moisture to the batter, giving the cakes a dense, chewy texture.

The step that matters

Adding the baking powder. Baking powder must be sifted evenly through the batter so the leavening reacts uniformly. Uneven distribution can leave dense spots or pockets of bitterness in the finished cakes.

“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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