Name: Cheap Rice Pudding
Ingredients: 6 ounces of rice; ¾ pound of raisins; flour (for dusting cloth); sugar (for sweet sauce, to taste); 1 pound of apples (optional, pared, cored, and quartered)

Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cheap Rice Pudding

Ingredients

6 ounces of rice
¾ pound of raisins
flour (for dusting cloth)
sugar (for sweet sauce, to taste)
1 pound of apples (optional, pared, cored, and quartered)

Directions

Prepare

Wash the rice thoroughly.
Mix the rice with the raisins and tie them in a well-floured cloth, leaving room for expansion.

Cook and serve

Boil the cloth bundle in water for 1 hour and 45 minutes.
Serve the pudding with a very sweet sauce.
For a variation, mix the rice with the apples and boil for 1 hour and 15 minutes to 1 hour and 30 minutes.

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.

Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,075 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Rice + raisintop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together565 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Raisin + appletop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,920 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,481 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Rice + appletop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,311 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice: Forms the body of the pudding as it swells and softens during boiling.
Raisins: Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the cooked pudding.
Apples: Add moisture and a tart, fruity flavour in the optional variation.

The step that matters

Leaving room for expansion when tying the cloth. Rice absorbs water and swells considerably as it cooks. If the cloth is packed tightly, the pudding can burst the cloth or cook unevenly, so room must be left for it to grow.

Swap the apple

The recipe marks apple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, raisin, flour, sugar, sauce):

Vanillafits better
Figfits better
Coconutfits better
Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, raisin, flour, sugar, sauce. 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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Cheap Rice Pudding