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Dessert

Rice Blancmange

Rice Blancmange is a sweet dish made from ground rice, milk, sugar, butter, and flavorings, cooked until thickened.

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 Blancmange

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice mixture

  1. Mix the ground rice with 1 cup of milk to form a smooth batter.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the remaining milk, sugar, butter, and your chosen flavoring.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil, then quickly stir in the rice batter.

  4. Let it boil for about 10 minutes, stirring constantly until it pulls away from the sides of the saucepan.

Set and serve

  1. Grease a mold with pure salad oil and pour in the rice mixture.

  2. Allow it to set completely, then turn it out and garnish with jam or fruit compote.

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 + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Ground rice
Its starch thickens with heat and gives the blancmange its firm, sliceable body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the rice starch thickens and sets into a creamy custard.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the set dessert a smooth, tender texture.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches the flavor and softens the texture of the set dessert.

The step that matters

Stir constantly while the mixture boils. Rice starch can settle and scorch on the bottom of the pan, and it can form lumps if not kept moving. Constant stirring keeps the heat even so the starch thickens into a smooth mixture that pulls away from the sides.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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