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Dessert

Fried Rice Cakes

Fried rice cakes are made by steaming rice with milk, sugar, and lemon rind, binding with egg yolks, frying, and sprinkling powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Fried Rice Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Wash the rice and place it in a stone jar.

  2. Pour the milk over the rice and add the sugar and lemon rind.

  3. Cover and steam until it becomes a thick mass.

Shape and set

  1. Bind the mixture with the egg yolks.

  2. Dust a shallow pan with flour and spread the mixture an inch thick.

  3. Set aside to cool, then cut into circles, diamonds, or squares.

Fry and serve

  1. Dip each piece in French fritter batter and fry in hot fat.

  2. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and garnish with currant jelly.

  3. Serve while hot.

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

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

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

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

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Forms the thick base that sets into a firm mass once cooked and cooled.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to add moisture and a soft, creamy texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cakes brown lightly when fried.
Egg yolks
Bind the mixture and add richness, helping it hold its shape when cut.

The step that matters

Set aside to cool before cutting. The mixture must cool and firm fully so it holds clean shapes; cutting it warm causes it to tear and slump.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, sugar, lemon, egg, flour. 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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