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Dessert

Empress Pudding

A baked rice pudding layered with raspberry and currant jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Empress Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the rice base

  1. Gently cook the rice with the lemon peel in the milk until quite soft.

  2. Let it cool slightly, then mix in the beaten eggs.

Layer and bake

  1. Butter a cake tin and place a layer of rice in it.

  2. Spread a layer of raspberry jam, then a layer of currant jam, and repeat until the tin is full, finishing with rice.

  3. Bake the pudding at 350°F (175°C) for 45 minutes.

Serve

  1. Turn out and serve with boiled custard, hot or cold.

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

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

  3. Lemon + raspberrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Raspberry + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together366 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

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

Rice
Softened in milk to form the creamy, bulky body of the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the rice and milk and set during baking to give the pudding structure.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to create a soft, creamy texture and moisture.
Raspberry jam
Adds sweetness and fruity flavour between the rice layers.
Currant jam
Adds sweetness and tart fruit flavour between the rice layers.

The step that matters

Cooking the rice until quite soft. Rice that stays firm will not break down into a creamy base, and it will not bind evenly with the eggs. Cooking it gently in milk lets the starch swell and soften slowly, and gentle heat helps the milk avoid scorching or curdling.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Blackberryfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, lemon, egg, raspberry, butter. 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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