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Dessert

Rice Blancmange

Rice Blancmange is a sweet rice pudding made with milk, cinnamon, lemon peel, cream, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,137 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Rice Blancmange

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Simmer the rice in a small quantity of water until it absorbs the water and is ready to burst.

Make the milk mixture

  1. Simmer the milk with the cinnamon and lemon peel; strain and sweeten with sugar.

  2. Add the cream to the milk mixture.

  3. Stir the rice into the milk mixture and simmer, stirring continuously until it becomes a mash.

Mould and serve

  1. Dip a mold in cold water and pour the mixture into it.

  2. Once cold, turn it out of the mold and serve with preserved raspberries, other fruit, custard, or cream.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Tea + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together197 recipes

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

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  4. Tea + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  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

Whole rice
Swells and breaks down into a mash that thickens the blancmange and gives it body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the rice cooks into, giving the dessert its creamy character.
Rich cream
Adds fat and richness, softening the texture and giving a smoother mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Stirring the rice into the milk mixture. Rice starch thickens the liquid and can scorch or stick to the bottom of the pan if not stirred continuously, so the mash can burn and taste bitter.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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