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Drink

Refreshing Drink

A sweetened rice drink made by boiling rice, straining, and adding sugar and flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Refreshing Drink

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rice thoroughly.

Make the rice milk

  1. Boil the rice in water for 1 hour.

  2. Strain away the water.

  3. Sweeten with sugar and flavor with fruit or vanilla essence.

Serve

  1. Let it cool before serving.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (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
Its starch releases into the boiling water, thickening the liquid and giving the milk body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the mild, starchy flavor of the rice.
Fruit or vanilla essence
Adds aroma and flavor to the finished milk.

Swap the vanilla

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

  1. Vanillathe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Raisinfits less well
  4. Blueberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, sugar. 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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