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Dessert

A Good Boiled Rice Pudding

A boiled rice pudding made with milk, sugar, lemon rind, almonds, eggs, optional candied orange rind and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

A Good Boiled Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice

  1. In a pot, swell and boil the rice in the milk until soft and thick.

  2. Sweeten with sugar while still hot.

Add the custard base

  1. Stir in lemon rind, pounded almonds, and whisked eggs.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a thickly buttered basin or mold, filling it completely.

  2. Cover with a buttered paper and a floured cloth.

  3. Boil for exactly 1 hour.

  4. Let it stand for 2 to 3 minutes before turning it out.

  5. Serve with sweet sauce, fruit syrup, or a compote of fresh fruit.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Rice + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Whole rice
Swells in the milk and thickens into a soft, starchy body for the pudding.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to form the creamy liquid that sets the pudding.
Eggs
Set when heated, binding the pudding and giving it a firm, custardy structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps give it a tender texture.
Pounded bitter almonds
Add a distinctive nutty, aromatic flavour to the pudding.

The step that matters

Fill the basin completely and cover tightly before boiling. Eggs set as they heat, so the mixture must fill the mold to avoid air pockets, and the tight cover keeps steam in so the pudding cooks evenly rather than drying or setting unevenly.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, sugar, lemon, almond, egg, butter. 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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