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Dessert

Empress Rice Pudding

A layered rice pudding with optional jam, spices, and pastry, served cold or warm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Empress Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice

  1. Cook the rice in milk until soft, ensuring no excess liquid remains.

Assemble the dish

  1. Grease a deep dish.

  2. Add a layer of short or flaky pastry under the rice.

  3. Layer the rice thickly.

  4. Add a layer of jam.

  5. Add a layer of rice.

  6. Repeat layering until the dish is full, with rice on top.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the eggs and butter into the warm rice.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

  3. Flavor with spice or lemon peel if desired.

  4. Serve cold or warm, with boiled custard if preferred.

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

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

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

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

  3. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  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
Forms the bulk of the pudding, soft and thick once cooked in milk.
Milk
Cooks the rice into a soft, creamy base that carries the other flavors.
Butter
Adds richness and a smoother, softer texture to the warm rice.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as the pudding cools.
Jam
Adds sweetness and fruity acidity between the layers of rice.

The step that matters

Cook the rice in milk until soft. The rice must absorb the milk fully and be soft before layering. Leftover liquid can make the pudding watery and stop it setting firmly as it cools.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, milk, butter, egg):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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

More rice pudding recipes

Baked 88Apple 84with Meringue 40Boiled 38French 30Lemon 29 See all 1,220 →

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