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Dessert

Sweet Rice

A sweet rice dish cooked with milk, butter, cinnamon, sugar, and egg yolks.

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 ↓

Sweet Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Wash the rice well.

  2. In a saucepan, combine rice, milk, butter, cinnamon, and sugar.

  3. Cook until thick, then stir in the egg yolks. Do not let it boil.

Serve

  1. Serve hot or cold.

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. Walnut + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  4. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Rice + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (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 swells and thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the dish body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that cooks down into a creamy, pudding-like texture.
Egg yolks
Set during gentle cooking to thicken and enrich the mixture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother mouthfeel.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavour of the milk and cinnamon.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks without boiling. Egg yolks thicken by gently setting their proteins. If the mixture boils or gets too hot, the yolks can scramble and turn grainy instead of smooth and creamy.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutthe original
  3. Pecansfits about as well
  4. Chestnutfits about as well

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