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Dessert

Rice Flummery

Rice Flummery is a sweet milk-based dessert thickened with rice flour and flavored with lemon peel, cinnamon, and peach water or almond.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,137 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Rice Flummery

Ingredients

Directions

Make the flummery

  1. Boil the new milk with lemon peel and cinnamon in a saucepan.

  2. Mix a little cold milk with enough rice flour to achieve a good consistency.

  3. Sweeten the mixture and add the peach water or beaten almond.

  4. Boil gently, stirring to prevent burning.

  5. Pour the mixture into a mold or pint basin, removing the spices.

Set and serve

  1. Once cooled, turn the flummery onto a dish.

  2. Serve with cream, milk, 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. Cinnamon + ricetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Cinnamon + peachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together625 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  5. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice flour
Thickens the milk into a set, sliceable flummery as it cools.
New milk
Forms the base of the dish and provides creamy body and milky flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the flavours of the milk and spices.

The step that matters

Boil gently, stirring to prevent burning. Milk scorches easily on the base of a pan, and rice flour can clump if not fully mixed in. Gentle heat with constant stirring keeps the mixture smooth and thickens it evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cinnamon, rice, flour, sugar, peach, 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.

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