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Dessert

Rice Pudding with Currants

A rice pudding made with currants, suet, and eggs, boiled in a cloth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,734 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Rice Pudding with Currants

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the rice in a cloth for 30 minutes, allowing it to swell.

  2. Remove the rice and add currants, suet, and beaten eggs.

  3. Tie the mixture in the cloth again and boil for 1.5 hours.

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. Currant + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Rice + curranttop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together497 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Rice + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,350 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Whole rice
Forms the bulk of the pudding and absorbs moisture as it swells and softens.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set as it cooks, giving the pudding structure.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy fruitiness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Pre-boiling the rice before adding the other ingredients. Swelling the rice first lets it absorb water before it is mixed with the eggs and suet, so the pudding does not turn out dense or soggy during the long boil.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, egg. 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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