Skip to main content
Dessert

Whole Rice Mould

A molded rice pudding made with Carolina rice, milk, sugar, and lemon rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rice and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Whole Rice Mould

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice

  1. Simmer the rice, sugar, lemon rind, and milk together until the rice is tender and the milk is almost absorbed.

  2. Remove the lemon rind.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a wet mold.

  2. Once firm, turn out and serve with jam, stewed fruit, or custard sauce.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Carolina rice
Swells as it simmers, thickening the milk and giving the mould its body.
Milk
Cooks into the rice, providing the creamy liquid that sets the mould.
Castor sugar
Sweetens the dish and helps the mould taste rounded and balanced.
Lemon rind
Adds aromatic citrus oil that flavours the milk while it simmers.

The step that matters

Simmering the rice in milk. Rice must cook long enough to become fully tender while the milk reduces, since starch gelatinises during cooking and then sets as the mould cools. Undercooked rice stays gritty, and overcooked milk can scorch on the bottom of the pan if it is not stirred.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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

You might also like

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