Skip to main content
Dessert

Rice Flummery

Rice Flummery is a sweetened milk thickened with rice flour, flavored with lemon peel, cinnamon, and peach water or almond.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and rice 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 Flummery

Ingredients

Directions

Make the flummery

  1. Boil the new milk with lemon peel and cinnamon.

  2. Mix in enough rice flour with a little cold milk to achieve a good consistency.

  3. Sweeten to taste and add the peach water or beaten almond.

  4. Boil carefully to prevent burning.

  5. Pour into a shape or pint basin, removing the spices.

  6. Once cold, turn the flummery onto a dish.

Serve

  1. Serve with cream, milk, or custard.

  2. For a sauce, mix ½ cup cream with ½ pint new milk, white wine, lemon juice, and sugar.

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 + ricetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Cinnamon + peachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together625 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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

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

  4. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  5. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice flour
Thickens the milk so it sets into a firm, sliceable flummery once cold.
New milk
Forms the body of the flummery and carries the flavours of the spices.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, soft texture to the sauce and serving.
Sugar
Sweetens the flummery and the sauce to taste.

The step that matters

Boil carefully to prevent burning.. Milk thickened with starch scorches easily on the base of the pan, and the scorched flavour spoils the whole batch. Stirring steadily over gentle heat keeps the starch dispersed and the milk smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cinnamon, rice, flour, sugar, peach, 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.

You might also like

Lemon Rice PuddingLemon Rice Pudding19 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesRice CakeRice Cake120 recipes