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Dessert

A George Pudding

A baked pudding of rice, apples, wine, and citrus, served with a wine‑egg sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

A George Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Boil rice in milk with lemon peel until tender.

  2. Drain the rice.

  3. Mix the drained rice with apples that have been boiled to a dry pulp.

  4. Add white wine, egg yolks, orange, citron, and sugar. Stir well.

  5. Beat egg whites to stiff peaks and fold them into the mixture.

Bake

  1. Line a mold with pastry.

  2. Fill the mold.

  3. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until golden brown.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Combine wine, sugar, egg yolks, and butter in a saucepan.

  2. Simmer without boiling, stirring until thickened.

  3. Serve over the pudding.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  4. Apple + white winetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Lemon + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Cooked until tender, it gives the pudding its body and soft, creamy texture.
Apples
Boiled to a dry pulp, they add moisture and natural sweetness to the filling.
Egg yolks
Enrich the filling and help it set into a custard-like texture when baked.
Egg whites
Beaten to stiff peaks and folded in, they lighten the mixture and help it rise.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma that balance the sweetness of the apples and sugar.

The step that matters

Simmer the sauce without boiling. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but boiling can curdle them into grainy lumps. Gentle heat and constant stirring keep the sauce smooth and thickened.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, milk, lemon, white wine, egg, orange, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, lemon, white wine, egg, orange, sugar. 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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