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Dessert

A Cheap Rice Pudding

A simple rice pudding made with rice, raisins, butter, sugar, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,377 recipes. Both carry alpha-terpineol, which smells lilac, floral. The science ↓

A Cheap Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Cook

  1. Tie the rice and raisins in a cloth, allowing room for the rice to swell.

  2. Boil for 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Transfer to a dish.

  2. Pour melted butter and sugar over it.

  3. Sprinkle with a little nutmeg.

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. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  2. Rice + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Rice + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 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
Starch that swells and softens as it cooks, giving the pudding its body.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture as they plump while boiling.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the mild flavour of the rice.

The step that matters

Tie the rice and raisins loosely in the cloth. Rice absorbs water and expands as it cooks. Without room to swell, the cloth can burst or the rice can be squeezed into a dense, uneven pudding.

Swap the raisin

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, butter, sugar, 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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