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Boiled Rice a PAllemande

A boiled rice dish cooked with milk, butter, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Boiled Rice a PAllemande

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Place the rice in a saucepan, cover with cold water, and boil for 5 minutes.

  2. Drain the rice and rinse with cold water.

Cook

  1. Transfer the rice to a double boiler, add milk, salt, sugar, and butter.

  2. Cover and cook until tender, adding more milk if necessary.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  3. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Rice
Starch that softens and thickens as it absorbs the milk, giving the dish its body.
Milk
Liquid that cooks into the rice, adding creaminess and richness to the texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the mild, creamy flavour of the milk.
Butter
Adds fat that rounds out flavour and makes the texture silkier.

The step that matters

Cover and cook until tender, adding more milk if necessary. Rice absorbs liquid as it gently simmers, so it can dry out or scorch if the milk runs low. Adding milk as needed keeps the grains soft and the dish creamy, and gentle heat in a double boiler prevents the milk from catching on the bottom.

“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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