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Rice Caudle

Rice Caudle is a warm dish made with rice, milk, clove, cinnamon, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Rice Caudle

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Rice Caudle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Soak the rice in cold water for one hour, then drain.

Make the caudle

  1. Combine the rice and milk in a saucepan and simmer until the rice can be pulped through a sieve.

  2. Add the pulp and milk back to the saucepan with the clove and cinnamon.

  3. Add loaf sugar to taste and simmer for ten minutes.

  4. If the mixture is too thick, add more milk.

Serve

  1. Serve the caudle on toast.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Breaks down into a pulp that thickens the milk and gives the caudle its body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the rice thickens into a creamy caudle.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness, adjusted to taste.

The step that matters

Simmer the rice until it pulps. Simmering the rice in milk must go on until the grains are soft enough to pass through a sieve. Undercooked grains stay gritty and will not thicken the caudle smoothly, while milk left at a hard simmer can scorch on the base of the pan.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Gingerfits about as well
  4. Clovethe original

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