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Dessert

Plain Rice Pudding

A simple rice pudding made with rice, water, sugar, lemon rind, flour, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and cinnamon 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 ↓

Plain Rice Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. In a saucepan, bring 12 pints of water to a boil.

  2. Add 1 pound of washed rice, 4 ounces of brown sugar, 1 teaspoon of salt, and the lemon rind.

  3. Boil gently for 30 minutes.

  4. Strain the water from the rice, keeping it dry.

Make the pudding

  1. To the rice, add 3 ounces of sugar, 4 tablespoons of flour, and ½ teaspoon of cinnamon.

  2. Stir carefully on the fire for 5-6 minutes.

  3. Transfer to a tin or pie dish and bake.

  4. Alternatively, boil for an additional 15 minutes for a pudding without baking.

Serve

  1. For the rice water, serve warm or cold, adding lemon juice for flavor.

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. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  3. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
Forms the body of the pudding and thickens as it cooks and absorbs liquid.
Flour
Helps bind the rice and thicken the mixture so it holds its shape.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a molasses flavor that deepens the color of the pudding.
Lemon rind
Adds aromatic citrus oils that perfume the rice while it cooks.

The step that matters

Stir carefully on the fire for 5-6 minutes. Once sugar, flour and rice are combined, the mixture can scorch on the base of the pan. Gentle, constant stirring spreads the heat and keeps the starch from sticking and burning.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, sugar, flour, cinnamon. 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 rice pudding recipes

Baked 88Apple 84with Meringue 40Boiled 38French 30Lemon 29 See all 1,220 →

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