Skip to main content
Main

Rice Dodgers

Fried rice cakes made with boiled rice, egg, sugar, flour, bread, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rice and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,259 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Rice Dodgers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Boil the rice in salted water until soft, then let it cool.

  2. In a bowl, combine the cooled rice, egg, sugar, and self-rising flour.

  3. Soak the slice of bread in water, drain it, and remove the crust.

  4. Mix the soaked bread into the rice mixture until well combined.

Fry and serve

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture into boiling lard or Ko-nut, ensuring they do not touch the bottom of the pot.

  2. Fry until golden brown and serve with hot coffee.

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 + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Rice + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Cooked and mashed into the batter, giving the cakes their soft, bulky body.
Egg
Binds the mixture together so the cakes hold their shape while frying.
Self-rising flour
Adds starch and leavening so the cakes set and puff a little in the hot fat.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the outside brown in the frying fat.
Bread
Soaked and mixed in to add moisture and softness to the batter.

The step that matters

Dropping spoonfuls into the fat. If the spoonfuls touch the bottom of the pot, they can stick and break apart. Keeping them suspended lets the cakes cook evenly and brown on all sides.

“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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesRice FrittersRice Fritters84 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes