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Dessert

A George Pudding

A baked pudding of rice, apples, wine, and eggs, flavored with citrus peel and sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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

Make the rice

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

  2. Drain the rice.

Mix and fill

  1. Mix the drained rice with the boiled apples, white wine, egg yolks, orange, citron, and sugar.

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

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

Bake and serve

  1. 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 until frothy and folded in, they lighten the mixture and help it rise and set.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the rice mixture as it sets in the oven.
Whole rice
Cooked tender in milk, it forms the body of the pudding.
Milk
Cooks the rice until tender and adds creaminess to the pudding.
Apples
Add moisture, sweetness and fruity flavour to the filling.
Citron
Adds a bitter, aromatic citrus note to the filling.

The step that matters

Folding the egg whites into the rice mixture. Beaten egg whites hold air, and overmixing or deflating them makes the filling dense. Fold gently so the foam stays intact and the pudding rises and sets light in the oven.

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.

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