Skip to main content
Dessert

A Porcupine Pudding

A pudding made from rice, milk, eggs, sugar, orange juice, and almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,125 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

A Porcupine Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the rice in new milk until tender and not too dry.

  2. Add the beaten eggs, sugar, and orange juice, and mix well.

  3. Pour the mixture into a mold.

  4. Boil for 1.5 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Turn it out onto a dish.

  2. Stick it thick with almond slips.

  3. Serve with cream or custard.

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. Orange + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Rice + orangetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Cooked in milk until tender, it forms the body of the pudding.
Eggs
Set when heated, binding the rice and milk into a firm, sliceable pudding.
Sweet almonds
Add crunch and a nutty aroma against the soft pudding.

The step that matters

Boiling the pudding in the mold. Egg mixtures set when heated gently. Boiling the mold too hard or for too long can make the eggs curdle and the texture turn spongy or dry, so the pudding should be set but still moist.

Swap the orange

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

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

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

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesRice CakeRice Cake120 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipes