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Dessert

Rice Bignets

Rice Bignets are sweet rice balls made with milk, rice, cream, sugar, spices, eggs, and bread crumbs, then fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Rice Bignets

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice paste

  1. In a saucepan, simmer the milk and rice until it forms a very stiff paste.

  2. Stir in the cream, sugar, lemon rind, cinnamon, mace, and nutmeg.

  3. Allow the mixture to cool.

  4. Beat in the eggs.

Shape the bignets

  1. Crumble the bread into small pieces.

  2. Mix the crumbled bread with the rice mixture.

  3. Cut the mixture into bits.

  4. Roll the bits into small balls.

  5. Dip each ball in the egg.

  6. Roll the dipped balls in the bread crumbs.

Fry

  1. Fry the balls quickly until golden brown.

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 + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Cooks into a stiff starchy paste that gives the balls their body and holds their shape.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set when fried, holding each ball together.
Bread crumbs
Form a coating that crisps and browns in the frying fat.
Thick cream
Adds richness and moisture, softening the texture of the paste.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the outside brown.
New milk
Provides the liquid that the rice absorbs and cooks into a paste.

The step that matters

Fry quickly until golden brown. High heat browns the crumb coating fast while the egg-bound centre warms through. If the frying is too slow, the balls soak up fat and can turn greasy and soft before the coating is golden.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, rice, cream, sugar, lemon, cinnamon, nutmeg):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, rice, cream, sugar, lemon, cinnamon, nutmeg. 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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