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Preserve

Rock Cream Pudding

A pudding made with rice, milk, powdered sugar, currant jelly, egg whites, vanilla, and thick cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Rock Cream Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice

  1. Boil the rice in milk until soft.

  2. Sweeten the milk with powdered sugar.

  3. Pile the rice on a dish.

  4. Place square lumps of currant jelly on top of the rice.

Make the topping and serve

  1. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks with a little powdered sugar and vanilla extract. Fold in the thick cream.

  2. Drop the mixture over the rice to resemble a rock of snow.

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

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Rice + vanillatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,352 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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
Cooks in milk to form a soft, starchy base that holds the dish together.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they create the light, airy foam of the snowy topping.
Currant jelly
Sits on the rice as square lumps, adding fruity sweetness and tartness.
Thick cream
Folded into the whipped whites, adding richness and moisture to the topping.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks. Egg whites must be whipped until they hold stiff peaks without being overbeaten. Underwhipped whites stay runny and collapse, while overbeaten whites turn grainy and dry. Any trace of fat or yolk also prevents them from foaming well.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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