Skip to main content
Dessert

Rice Flummery

Rice flummery is a sweetened milk and rice flour dessert flavored with lemon peel, cinnamon, and optional peach water or almond.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,137 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Rice Flummery

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the fresh milk with lemon peel and cinnamon.

  2. Mix rice flour with a little cold milk to achieve a good consistency.

  3. Sweeten the mixture and add peach water or beaten almond.

  4. Boil carefully to avoid burning.

  5. Pour into a shape or basin, removing the spices.

  6. Once cold, turn the flummery onto a dish and serve with cream, milk, or custard.

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. Cinnamon + ricetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Cinnamon + peachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together625 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  5. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 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 flour
Thickens the milk so it sets into a firm, sliceable flummery.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the rice flour thickens and flavours.
Sugar
Sweetens the flummery to taste.

The step that matters

Boil carefully to avoid burning. Rice flour thickens as it cooks, and milk scorches easily on the base of a pan. Stirring and gentle heat keep the mixture smooth and stop a burnt taste from spreading through the set dessert.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Blueberryfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cinnamon, rice, flour, sugar, peach. 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