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Dessert

Five Minutes Pudding

A quick pudding made from ground rice, caster sugar, flour, egg, and topped with jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Sugar and flour 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 ↓

Five Minutes Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine ground rice, caster sugar, and flour in a bowl.

  2. Add the egg and mix until smooth.

  3. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding dish.

  4. Top with a little jam.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam for five minutes or until set.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

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

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Ground rice
Provides the bulk and body of the pudding as it cooks and sets.
Caster sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the mixture cook to a soft, tender texture.
Flour
Adds structure, helping the pudding hold its shape once set.
Egg
Binds the mixture and sets with heat, giving it a firm yet tender body.

The step that matters

Steam until set. The pudding is done when it has firmed through. Undercooking leaves it wet in the centre, while overcooking can make it dry and rubbery as the egg proteins tighten too far.

“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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