Name: Ground Rice Milk
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon ground rice; 1½ cups milk; a bit of cinnamon; lemon peel; nutmeg; sugar to taste

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Ground Rice Milk

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the ground rice with the milk, cinnamon, lemon peel, and nutmeg.
Sweeten the mixture when it is nearly done.
To reduce earthy taste, soak the rice in cold water for 1 hour, then rinse well.
Add more water and simmer gently until the rice is clear.
Add wine and sugar, then boil everything together.

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.

Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,917 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,137 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,318 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,950 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

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

Swap the lemon

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

Vanillafits better
Raisinfits better
Figfits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, cinnamon, nutmeg, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.