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Dessert

Oxford Pudding

A boiled rice pudding served with butter, sugar or treacle, optionally with currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,645 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Oxford Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Wash the rice in four or five waters.

  2. Tie the rice into a pudding cloth, not too tightly.

Cook

  1. Place it in a pot of cold water.

  2. Bring to a boil and let it boil for two hours.

  3. Optionally, boil currants with the rice.

Serve

  1. Serve with cold butter and sugar or treacle.

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 + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Currant + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

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

  5. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Swells as it cooks, forming the body of the pudding.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy texture as they plump in the simmering water.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that melts into the warm pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the pudding.
Treacle
Adds deep sweetness and a rich, caramel-like flavour.

The step that matters

Tie the rice loosely in the cloth. Rice swells considerably as it absorbs water. If the cloth is tied tightly, the grains have no room to expand, which can leave the pudding dense or split the cloth.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, butter, sugar):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, butter, 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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