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Dessert

An Indian Trifle

A dessert made with milk, cinnamon, rice flour, custard, almonds, and currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

An Indian Trifle

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil the milk with the cinnamon until fragrant.

  2. Mix the rice flour with a little cold milk to form a paste.

  3. Add the paste to the boiling milk and sweeten to taste.

  4. Pour the mixture into a dish and let it cool.

Shape and assemble

  1. Once cool, cut it into star shapes or any desired shape.

  2. Remove any excess rice.

  3. Fill the gaps with boiled custard.

  4. Decorate with slit almonds and spots of currant jelly.

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 + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

New milk
Forms the liquid base that sets into a soft, creamy body.
Rice flour
Thickens the milk as it heats and sets it into a firm, sliceable form when cooled.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the set base.

The step that matters

Adding the rice flour paste to the boiling milk. Rice flour must be smoothed in cold milk first so it does not clump. Stirring it into hot milk and keeping it moving lets the starch gelatinise evenly, giving a smooth, thick mixture that sets properly as it cools.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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