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Dessert

A Good Boiled Rice Pudding

A boiled rice pudding made with milk, sugar, lemon rind, almonds, eggs, and optional butter or candied orange rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

A Good Boiled Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Combine the rice and milk in a pot. Heat slowly until it simmers, stirring occasionally until the rice is soft and thick.

  2. Sweeten the mixture with sugar while it is still hot. Stir in the lemon rind, pounded almonds, and whisked eggs.

Set and boil

  1. Let the mixture cool, then pour it into a well-buttered basin or mold, filling it completely.

  2. Cover the basin with buttered paper and a floured cloth, then boil the pudding for exactly one hour.

Serve

  1. Allow the pudding to stand for 2 to 3 minutes before turning it out. Serve with sweet sauce, fruit syrup, or fresh fruit compote.

  2. For added flavor, consider using coconut-flavored milk or vanilla.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  5. Rice + milktop 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

Rice
Its starch softens and thickens with the milk, giving the pudding its body.
Milk
Cooks the rice slowly and forms the creamy, moist base of the pudding.
Eggs
Set as the mixture cooks, binding the pudding and giving it structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the flavor of the lemon and almonds.
Bitter almonds
Add a strong, aromatic almond flavor when pounded into the mixture.

The step that matters

Boiling the covered pudding for one hour. Egg proteins set gradually in gentle heat, so a steady simmer and a well-sealed cover cook the custard evenly and keep it moist rather than rubbery or dry.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

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