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Dessert

Boiled Rice Cake, with White Wine

A boiled rice cake flavored with sherry, water, sugar, lemon, and rinsed in white wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sherry and white wine match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Boiled Rice Cake, with White Wine

Oven, in the book's wordsA steady oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Rinse the rice.

  2. Boil the rice gently in a little water.

  3. Remove the rice from the heat before it is fully soft and drain the water.

  4. Add sherry, water, sugar, lemon juice, and minced lemon rind to the rice.

  5. Return the mixture to heat and simmer until the rice is thoroughly cooked.

Mold and set

  1. Butter the inside of a mold.

  2. Rinse the mold with white wine.

  3. Let the rice cool to tepid.

  4. Pour the cooled rice into the mold.

  5. Let it stand overnight to firm up.

  6. Do not turn it out until just before serving.

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. Sherry + white winetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Lemon + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

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

  5. Sherry + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Provides the starchy body that becomes a firm, sliceable cake as it cooks and cools.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the sharpness of the lemon and wine.
Sherry or madeira
Adds aroma and fortified wine flavour that carries through the cooked rice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and the wine flavour.

The step that matters

Simmering until thoroughly cooked after adding the liquids. The rice was removed from the heat before it was fully soft, so it must finish cooking fully in the sweet wine mixture. Undercooked grains stay firm and grainy, and the cake will not set evenly or slice cleanly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, sherry, sugar, butter, white 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.

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