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Dessert

Rich Flummery

A sweet, thickened milk dessert flavored with lemon, cinnamon, and peach water or almond, served with cream or custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,137 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Rich Flummery

Ingredients

Directions

Make the flummery

  1. In a saucepan, boil the new milk with lemon peel and cinnamon.

  2. Mix rice flour with a little cold milk to form a thick paste.

  3. Sweeten the mixture and add peach water or beaten almond.

  4. Carefully boil the mixture, stirring to prevent burning.

  5. Pour into a mold or pint basin, removing the spices.

  6. Once cooled, turn the flummery onto a dish.

Serve

  1. Serve with cream, milk, or custard.

  2. For a sauce, mix cream with new milk, white wine, lemon juice, and sugar, then pour over the flummery.

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. Cinnamon + ricetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Cinnamon + peachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together625 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  5. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice flour
Thickens the milk into a set, soft body as it cooks.
New milk
Forms the liquid base that the rice flour thickens into the flummery.
Sugar
Sweetens the dish and balances the flavour of the milk.
Lemon peel
Adds a citrus aroma infused into the hot milk.

The step that matters

Stirring while the mixture boils. Rice flour settles and scorches on the bottom of the pan easily. Constant stirring keeps the starch dispersed and prevents burning, which would give a bitter, gritty taste and a ruined texture.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, cinnamon, rice, flour, sugar, peach, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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

More flummery recipes

Rice 36Dutch 21Oatmeal 10Raspberry 9Blackberry 6French 5 See all 41 →

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