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Dessert

Rice Drops

Rice Drops are small sweet pastries made from a dough of flour, butter, sugar, eggs, milk, and lemon peel, baked until pale.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Rice Drops

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Weigh the flour on a clean surface and make a well in the center.

  2. Add the butter, sugar, and eggs into the well and rub together until smooth.

  3. Gradually add the milk and incorporate the flour to form a soft dough.

  4. Weigh out 3 oz portions of dough.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll each portion into a ball.

  2. Wash each ball with milk.

  3. Dip each ball in rice flour.

  4. Place the floured balls on a well-buttered baking sheet, 2 inches apart.

  5. Top each ball with a small piece of lemon peel.

  6. Bake in a cool oven at 400°F (200°C) for about 20 minutes until pale.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

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

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Patent flour
Forms the structure of the soft dough as its proteins set during baking.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the dough and contributes to a rich crumb.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness.
Castor sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps the balls brown lightly in the oven.
Sweet milk
Hydrates the flour to form the dough and, brushed on, promotes browning.

The step that matters

Bake in a cool oven until pale. Baking at a moderate, not hot, temperature lets the balls set and dry through without browning too quickly on the outside. Removing them once they are pale avoids over-browning, which would make the sugar and milk surfaces bitter.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, egg, milk, rice. 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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