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Dessert

Cheap Rice Pudding

A simple pudding made from rice, raisins, optional apples, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and raisin work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 565 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Cheap Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rice thoroughly.

  2. Mix the rice with the raisins.

Cook and serve

  1. Tie the mixture in a well-floured cloth, leaving room for expansion.

  2. Boil the tied mixture in water for 1 hour and 45 minutes.

  3. Serve the pudding with a sweet 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 + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Raisin + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,920 recipes

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

  3. Rice + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,311 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 body of the pudding as it cooks and swells in the cloth.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Tie the mixture in the cloth with room to expand. Rice absorbs water and swells as it cooks. Leaving space in the cloth lets it expand without bursting the wrapping or squeezing out, so the pudding keeps its shape.

Swap the apple

The recipe marks apple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, raisin):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, raisin. 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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