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Dessert

Rice Flummery

Rice Flummery is a sweetened milk dessert thickened with rice flour and flavored with cinnamon and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,137 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Rice Flummery

Ingredients

Directions

Make the flummery

  1. Mix rice flour with a little cold milk.

  2. Add the mixture to 1 pint of boiled milk, sweetened and flavored with cinnamon and lemon peel.

  3. Boil while stirring constantly until thick.

Set and serve

  1. Pour into a mold and let it cool.

  2. Turn out and serve with thick cream or thin 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. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice flour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells when boiled, giving the flummery its body.
Milk
Forms the base of the dish and sets into a soft, creamy body as it cools.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the warm spice and citrus flavours.

The step that matters

Boil while stirring constantly until thick. Rice flour starch can settle and scorch on the bottom of the pan if not stirred, and it needs to reach a boil to swell and thicken properly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, flour, milk, sugar, cinnamon, cream. 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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