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Dessert

Rice and Gooseberry Pudding

A pudding made of rice and green gooseberries, cooked in a cloth and served with sweet sauce or sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Rice and Gooseberry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Spread 6 ounces of rice evenly over a moist, well-floured pudding cloth.

  2. Place 1 pint of green gooseberries on top, after removing the heads and stalks.

  3. Gather the cloth around the fruit, leaving room for the rice to swell.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the pudding for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  2. Serve with a very sweet sauce or plenty of sugar.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 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

Rice
Swells as it cooks, forming the soft, starchy body of the pudding.
Green gooseberries
Provide tart acidity that balances the sweetness of the sugar or sauce.

The step that matters

Gathering the cloth with room for the rice to swell. Rice absorbs water and expands as it cooks. If the cloth is packed tightly around the rice and fruit, the grains cannot swell properly and the pudding can turn dense or burst its wrapping.

“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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