Skip to main content
Dessert

Portuguese Sweet Rice

A sweet rice dish cooked with milk, sugar, eggs, cream, and flavored with cinnamon or burnt almond dust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Laurel and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 691 recipes. Both carry cinnamyl acetate, which smells sweet aromatic, cinnamon. The science ↓

Portuguese Sweet Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Wash the rice.

  2. Boil the rice in the milk with the sugar and laurel leaf until soft, about 1.5 hours. Remove the laurel leaf.

Make the custard

  1. Let the rice sit off the heat for 5 minutes.

  2. Gradually stir in the beaten eggs and thick cream.

  3. Heat the mixture over the fire until it reaches boiling.

  4. Let it cool, stirring occasionally.

Chill and serve

  1. Transfer to a glass or pie dish.

  2. Refrigerate for 2 hours.

  3. Sift powdered cinnamon or burnt almond dust over the surface before serving.

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. Laurel + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together691 recipes

    Shared aroma: cinnamyl acetate (sweet aromatic, cinnamon).

  2. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Softens as it simmers in milk, forming the thick body of the pudding.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to give a creamy, tender base.
Eggs
Set when heated, thickening the pudding and giving it structure.
Thick cream
Adds fat and richness, giving a smoother, softer texture.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the richness of the milk, eggs and cream.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs and cream. Stirring the beaten eggs in gradually keeps them from clumping. Heating the mixture to boiling is needed to thicken the eggs, but it must be done gently and with stirring so the eggs do not scramble or curdle.

“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.

You might also like

Rice CakeRice Cake120 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesRice CreamRice Cream43 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipes