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Dessert

Cocoanut Rice Custard

A custard made with milk, coconut, rice, raisins, sugar, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and rice 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 ↓

Cocoanut Rice Custard

Oven, in the book's wordsA steady oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Flavor the milk strongly with coconut.

  2. Add the boiled rice, raisins, sugar, and beaten eggs to the milk.

  3. Set the pudding dish in a pan of hot water.

Bake

  1. Bake until the custard is well set.

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

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

  2. Rice + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and carries the coconut flavor.
Boiled rice
Adds body and bulk, giving the pudding a soft, tender texture.
Eggs
Set during baking to thicken the milk into a firm, sliceable custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the richness of the milk and eggs.
Raisins
Add chewy pockets of sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Bake until the custard is well set. Eggs thicken as they heat, but overbaking can make the custard grainy and watery. Bake until set at the edges with a slight wobble in the center, since it firms further as it cools.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, rice, sugar, 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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