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Dessert

Cheap Rice Pudding

A simple rice pudding made with raisins and sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and raisin work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 565 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Cheap Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rice thoroughly.

  2. Mix the rice with the raisins and tie them in a well‑floured cloth, leaving room for them to swell.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the cloth for 1 hour and 45 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Rice + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,396 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Raisin + saucetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together297 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Swells and softens as it cooks, giving the pudding its body and soft, starchy texture.
Raisins
Add sweetness and a chewy texture, and plump up in the boiling water.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth with room to swell. Rice and raisins absorb water and expand while boiling. If the cloth is tied too tightly, the pudding is squeezed and can become dense or burst its wrapping.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Coconutfits about as well
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Raisinthe original
  4. Avocadofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, sugar, 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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