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Dessert

Rock Cream

A rice pudding dessert topped with currant jelly and a whipped egg white cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Tea and rice work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 197 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Rock Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Boil the rice in sweet milk until soft.

  2. Sweeten the rice with powdered sugar and pile it high on a dish.

Top and finish

  1. Add square pieces of currant jelly or preserved fruits on top.

  2. Beat the egg whites very stiff with a little powdered sugar and flavor with orange flower water or vanilla.

  3. Add 1 teaspoon of cream to the egg mixture and drop it 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. Tea + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together197 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Tea + orangetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together333 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  5. Tea + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together738 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the soft, starchy base that holds the shape of the pile.
Sweet milk
Cooks the rice to a tender, creamy texture and adds moisture.
Egg whites
Whipped into a stiff foam that gives the topping its light, airy structure.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the rice and helps steady the whipped egg white foam.
Cream
Adds richness and softens the egg white topping slightly.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites very stiff. Egg whites must be whipped until they hold firm peaks so the topping keeps its rock-like shape. Under-beaten whites collapse and spread, while over-beaten whites turn dry and grainy.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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