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Creamed Rice

Creamed Rice is a thickened rice dish cooked in milk with lemon rind, nutmeg or laurel, sweetened, molded, and served with cream and jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Creamed Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Boil rice in milk until very thick and tender.

  2. Add lemon rind and nutmeg or laurel leaf halfway through cooking.

  3. Sweeten to taste and pour into molds.

Set and serve

  1. Let cool completely, then turn out.

  2. Serve with thick cream or custard, and garnish with jam or preserved fruits.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

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 the milk and gives the pudding its body once cooled.
Whole milk
Cooks with the rice to form a creamy, tender base and adds richness.
Lemon rind
Adds a bright aroma that balances the sweetness of the pudding.

The step that matters

Cooking the rice until very thick. Rice must be cooked long enough in the milk for its starch to swell and soften fully. If it is undercooked or the mixture is too loose, the pudding will not set firmly in the molds and may collapse when turned out.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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