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Dessert

An Excellent Ground Rice Pudding

A sweet pudding made from ground rice, cream, milk, sugar, butter, cinnamon, eggs, and sherry, baked and topped with icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,137 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

An Excellent Ground Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding base

  1. Mix the ground rice with the cream until smooth.

  2. Stir the mixture into the warm milk in a pot.

  3. Add sugar, butter, salt, and cinnamon; stir for 10 minutes over heat.

  4. Cool the mixture and remove the cinnamon stick.

  5. Beat the egg yolks and whites with the sherry, then stir into the pudding.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the pudding into a buttered dish and bake for 20 minutes.

  2. Remove from the oven, cover with icing, and return to bake for another 10 minutes.

  3. Serve with wine sauce or custard.

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 + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  4. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Ground rice
Thickens the milk and cream into a soft, set pudding body.
Egg yolks
Enrich the pudding and help it set when baked.
Egg whites
Add lightness and help the baked pudding hold its structure.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender mouthfeel.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and aids browning in the oven.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the ground rice swells and cooks in.

The step that matters

Stir the rice mixture over heat for 10 minutes. Ground rice must be cooked long enough for its starch to swell and thicken the liquid; undercooked rice leaves a grainy, thin pudding and can taste raw.

Swap the cinnamon

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

  1. Cinnamonthe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Celeryfits less well
  4. Gingerfits less well

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