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Dessert

Rice Pudding with Fruit

A rice pudding made with currants, gooseberries, or sliced apples, boiled in milk and served with sweetened melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Rice Pudding with Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. In a pot, swell the rice in milk over the fire for 15 minutes.

  2. Drain the rice and spread it over a floured cloth.

Shape and boil

  1. Add the currants, gooseberries, or sliced apples and sugar to the rice.

  2. Draw the cloth up carefully and tie it securely but loosely.

  3. Boil the pudding for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Turn out the pudding and serve with sweetened melted butter.

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

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

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Swells in milk to form the soft, starchy body of the pudding.
Currants or gooseberries or sliced apples
Add tartness and fruit flavour that contrasts with the sweet rice.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the fruit's tartness.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the rice absorbs and swells in as it cooks.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth securely but loosely. Rice swells as it cooks, so a cloth tied too tightly can restrict expansion and split or squeeze the pudding, while one tied too loosely can let water in and make it soggy.

Swap the currant

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

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

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