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Dessert

Cheap Rice Pudding

A simple rice pudding made with rice, raisins, and optional apples, boiled in a cloth bundle and served with sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cheap Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rice thoroughly.

Cook and serve

  1. Mix the rice with the raisins and tie them in a well-floured cloth, leaving room for expansion.

  2. Boil the cloth bundle in water for 1 hour and 45 minutes.

  3. Serve the pudding with a very 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Rice + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  4. Rice + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,311 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 absorbs water, giving it a soft, starchy texture.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of moisture throughout the pudding.
Flour
Dusted on the cloth to form a light crust that helps keep the bundle together while boiling.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth with room to expand. Rice swells considerably as it absorbs water. If the cloth is tied too tightly, the pudding can burst or cook unevenly, so leaving space for expansion lets it swell safely.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, raisin, flour, sauce. 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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