Skip to main content
Dessert

A George Pudding

A pudding made from rice, apples, wine, and citrus, baked in a pastry-lined mold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

A George Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Boil the rice in milk with the lemon peel until tender.

  2. Drain the rice and mix it with the boiled apples, white wine, egg yolks, orange, citron, and sugar.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line a mold with pastry and beat the egg whites until frothy.

  2. Fold the egg whites into the rice mixture and fill the mold.

  3. Bake until golden brown and serve upside down.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Apple + white winetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together372 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Beaten to a froth, they lighten the filling and help it rise and set in the oven.
Egg yolks
Enrich the filling and help it set into a tender, custard-like texture.
Whole rice
Cooked soft in milk, it forms the body of the pudding and absorbs flavour.
Apples
Add moisture and fruity sweetness, softening as they cook into the filling.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to give a creamy, tender base for the filling.

The step that matters

Fold the egg whites into the rice mixture. Whites hold air only while they are frothy and stiff enough. Folding gently, rather than stirring, keeps the air in so the pudding rises and stays light rather than dense.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, milk, lemon, white wine, egg, orange, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, lemon, white wine, egg, orange, 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.

You might also like

Lemon Rice PuddingLemon Rice Pudding19 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesApple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipes