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Dessert

Carolina Rice Pudding

A sweet rice pudding flavored with nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon peel, and egg yolks, served with butter and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Carolina Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice mixture

  1. Wash the rice clean and place it in a saucepan with the milk.

  2. Stir continuously until the mixture becomes very thick, being careful not to let it burn.

  3. Transfer the thick rice mixture to a pan.

  4. Add nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon peel, and egg yolks to the pan. Mix everything together and sweeten to your taste.

Cook and serve

  1. Tie the mixture tightly in a cloth.

  2. Place the clothed mixture in boiling water.

  3. Keep the water boiling for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  4. Melt butter and pour it over the pudding.

  5. Sprinkle fine sugar over the pudding.

  6. Add a little wine to the sauce for extra flavor, if desired.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Starch that thickens with milk into the body of the pudding.
Milk
Liquid that cooks with the rice into a soft, creamy base.
Egg yolks
Enrich and set the pudding, adding richness and a firmer texture.

The step that matters

Stirring the thickening mixture. Rice and milk scorch easily on the bottom of a pan as they thicken. Constant stirring spreads the heat and starches evenly, preventing burnt flavor and lumps.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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