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Dessert

Rock Cream

A sweet rice pudding topped with currant jelly and finished with whipped egg whites and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rock Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice

  1. Boil the rice in milk until soft.

  2. Sweeten the rice with powdered sugar.

  3. Pile the rice onto a serving dish.

Assemble the rock

  1. Add square lumps of currant jelly or preserved fruit on top.

  2. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks with a little powdered sugar and flavor with orange-flower water or vanilla.

  3. Fold in the rich cream and drop it over the rice to resemble a snow-covered rock.

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

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

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

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

  3. Rice + orangetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Currant + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,034 recipes

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

  5. Milk + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Softens in milk to form the creamy pudding base that holds the dish together.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to give a soft, creamy, moist pudding.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they form the light, snowy topping.
Rich cream
Folded in to add richness and softness to the whipped topping.
Currant jelly
Adds fruity sweetness and a bright, tart contrast to the rice.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks. Egg whites need to be beaten until stiff and glossy so they hold their shape. Underbeaten whites will slump, while overbeaten whites turn dry and grainy.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, sugar, egg, cream, orange. 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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