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Dessert

Rice Meringue

Rice Meringue is a baked rice pudding topped with a sweet meringue layer.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Rice Meringue

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the rice in the milk until soft.

  2. Beat the egg yolks separately and stir them into the boiling milk until it thickens.

  3. Add a pinch of salt, butter, and sugar to taste.

  4. Pour the mixture into a baking dish.

Top and bake

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff, adding a little sugar.

  2. Flavor the egg whites with vanilla and spread them on top of the pudding.

  3. Brown in a 350°F (175°C) oven.

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. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  4. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  5. Rice + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Rice
Softens in the milk and gives the pudding its body and bulk.
Milk
Cooks with the rice and eggs to form the creamy base of the pudding.
Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the custard, and whipped whites set into the meringue topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the egg whites whip into a stable meringue.

The step that matters

Stirring the yolks into the boiling milk. Adding hot milk to yolks or stirring them in carelessly can scramble the eggs into lumps. Adding them to the boiling milk while stirring constantly lets the yolks thicken the custard smoothly.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Cocoafits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

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