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Dessert

French Rice Cream

A creamy rice dessert made with milk, sugar, eggs, and flavored to taste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

French Rice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Mix the Fayeux's crème de riz smooth in ½ pint of cold milk.

  2. Stir it into ½ pint of boiling milk with dissolved sugar.

  3. Stir over heat until it boils.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat in 2 well-whisked eggs and continue stirring for 10 minutes.

  2. Add flavoring and serve hot or cold.

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 + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Fayeux's crème de riz
Rice starch swells as it heats, thickening the milk into a smooth, pudding-like body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base, supplying creaminess and the body the rice starch thickens.
Eggs
Set during gentle heating, adding richness and firmness to the custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the mild, starchy flavor of the rice.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs. Whisked eggs must be stirred into the hot mixture and kept moving. Constant stirring spreads the heat evenly so the egg proteins set smoothly instead of curdling or scrambling, and it helps prevent the starch from scorching on the base of the pan.

“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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