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Dessert

Rice Custard

A dessert made with milk, ground rice, eggs, and jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and rice 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 ↓

Rice Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice custard

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan and sweeten to taste.

  2. Stir in ground rice until the mixture thickens.

  3. Remove from heat and add the beaten egg whites, stirring for 2-3 minutes.

  4. Pour the mixture into cups that have been chilled in cold water.

Finish and serve

  1. Once cooled, turn the cups out onto a serving dish.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix the egg yolks with the additional milk to make custard.

  3. Pour the custard around the rice custard and top with currant jelly or raspberry jam.

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

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

  2. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

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

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
Thickens the milk so the mixture sets firm enough to hold its shape when turned out.
Egg whites
Add airy structure and help the custard set lightly when stirred in off the heat.
Egg yolks
Enrich the sauce and give it a smooth, thickened texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of both the rice custard and the custard sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the egg whites off the heat. If the mixture is too hot, the egg whites can scramble or cook unevenly instead of folding in smoothly, so removing it from the heat first keeps the texture soft and even.

Swap the currant

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

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

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

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