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Dessert

Miniature Rice Pudding

A small rice pudding baked in cups, flavored with lemon peel, almonds, or vanilla, served with sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Miniature Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding base

  1. Let the rice swell in 1 pint of milk over low heat, adding a strip of lemon peel.

  2. Stir in the butter and the remaining 1 pint of milk, then let the mixture cool.

  3. Add the well-beaten eggs and a few drops of almond or vanilla essence.

Bake and serve

  1. Butter small cups or molds, line them with thin slices of candied peel, and fill them three-quarters full.

  2. Bake for about 40 minutes, then turn them out onto a serving dish and serve with sweet sauce.

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

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

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  5. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Swells in the milk to give the pudding its body and soft, creamy texture.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to form the liquid base that sets into a custard-like pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender mouthfeel to the pudding.
Eggs
Set during baking to bind the pudding and give it a firm, sliceable structure.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs to the cooled mixture. If the mixture is too hot, the beaten eggs can scramble instead of blending smoothly. Letting it cool first keeps the eggs smooth so they set into an even, tender custard during baking.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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