Skip to main content
Dessert

Windsor Palace Puddings

A steamed pudding made with rice, apples, sugar, lemon, egg whites, and served with custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rice and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Windsor Palace Puddings

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apple base

  1. Boil the rice in milk until it forms a thick paste.

  2. Pare, core, and scald the apples.

  3. Beat the apples with the rice.

  4. Add sugar, lemon peel, and lemon juice or essence, mixing well.

Make the pudding

  1. Beat the egg whites until frothy.

  2. Fold the frothy egg whites into the mixture gently.

  3. Dip a basin or mold in boiling water.

  4. Pour the mixture into the hot basin.

  5. Place the mold in a pan of boiling water and cook until the egg whites are set.

Serve

  1. Prepare a custard with the egg yolks.

  2. Pour the custard around the pudding when serving.

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

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

  2. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

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

  5. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 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
Boiled in milk to form a thick paste that gives the pudding its body.
Egg whites
Beaten and folded in to lighten the mixture and set it as it cooks.
Apples
Form the main fruit base, adding flavour and moisture to the pudding.
Egg yolks
Make the custard that is poured around the pudding, adding richness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the apple mixture.

The step that matters

Folding the egg whites. Egg whites hold air only when beaten to a froth and folded in gently. Stirring them hard knocks out the air, so the pudding will not rise and set light.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, milk, sugar, lemon, egg):

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

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