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Rice and Preserve

A simple rice dish flavored with butter, currant jelly, and sugar, optionally thickened with milk.

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

Rice and Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the rice until just done.

  2. Add butter, currant jelly, and sugar to the rice and mix well with a fork.

  3. If the mixture is too thick, add some milk.

  4. Dish up in pyramids and serve.

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. Butter + milktop 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. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the bulk of the dish and gives its soft, tender body when cooked just done.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, moist texture that coats the rice grains.
Currant jelly
Provides fruity sweetness and acidity, plus a glossy color and flavor through the rice.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tartness of the currant jelly.

The step that matters

Adding milk only if needed. Rice keeps absorbing liquid as it sits, so a thick mixture can become stiff. Adding milk gradually loosens it while keeping the rice moist and soft, and too much makes it runny.

Swap the currant

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

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

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