Skip to main content
Dessert

Simple Rice Pudding

A simple pudding made by boiling rice in milk with sugar, nutmeg, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Simple Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rice.

Cook

  1. Combine the rice, milk, sugar, nutmeg, and butter in a pot.

  2. Boil until the rice is soft. If too thin, boil longer.

Serve

  1. Pour into a dish and serve cold.

  2. If baking, remove the brown skin before pouring into the dish and replace it on top.

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

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

  3. Rice + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Softens and swells as it cooks, forming the thick, starchy body of the pudding.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to create the creamy liquid base that thickens as it simmers.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the mild dairy and rice flavors.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother mouthfeel.
Nutmeg
Contributes warm, aromatic flavor to the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil until the rice is soft. Milk scorches easily on the bottom of a pot as it reduces, and the pudding keeps thickening as it cooks. Judging when the rice is soft and the texture is right prevents both burning and a runny result.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Gingerfits less well
  4. Turmericfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, rice, sugar, butter. 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 →

You might also like

Rice CakeRice Cake120 recipesRice CreamRice Cream43 recipesRice JellyRice Jelly42 recipesRice Batter CakesRice Batter Cakes11 recipes