Skip to main content
Dessert

Rice Flummery

Rice Flummery is a sweet dish made by boiling ground rice in milk with lemon peel, almonds, and sugar, then setting it.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rice and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,456 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Rice Flummery

Ingredients

Directions

Make the flummery

  1. Boil the ground rice slowly in the milk.

  2. Add lemon peel and chopped almonds.

  3. Stir continuously while boiling for 20 minutes.

  4. Pour the mixture into a mold and let it stand overnight.

Serve

  1. Serve with cream and preserved fruit.

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. Rice + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  3. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Ground rice
Thickens the milk as it boils, giving the flummery its body and set.
Whole milk
Forms the liquid base and, with the rice, provides richness and moisture.
Bitter almonds
Add a distinctive bitter, nutty aroma that flavours the mixture.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the mixture and balances the bitterness of the almonds.

The step that matters

Stir continuously while boiling. Ground rice settles and scorches on the bottom of the pan if it is not stirred, and the starch must be fully cooked to thicken evenly and set firm.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, almond, 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 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesRice CakeRice Cake120 recipes