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Dessert

Rice Milk for a Dessert

A dessert made by boiling rice, adding milk and eggs, then serving with butter, sugar, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 Milk for a Dessert

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Boil ½ cup of rice in water until tender.

  2. Pour off the water and add 2 cups of milk.

  3. Beat 2 eggs and stir them into the mixture.

  4. Boil everything together for a few minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with butter, sugar, and nutmeg.

  2. Optionally, sweeten and cool in molds, then turn out onto a deep dish surrounded by rich milk seasoned with wine and sugar.

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 + buttertop 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 + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Its starch swells and thickens the pudding as it cooks in the milk.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the rice absorbs and forms the creamy body of the pudding.
Eggs
Set when heated, helping the pudding thicken and hold its shape.

The step that matters

Stirring in the beaten eggs and boiling briefly. Egg proteins set with heat, so the eggs can curdle or turn grainy if the mixture boils too hard or too long. Keep it at a gentle boil and stir constantly.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Gingerfits less well
  4. Tarragonfits less well

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

More rice pudding recipes

Baked 88Apple 84with Meringue 40Boiled 38French 30Lemon 29 See all 1,220 →

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