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Dessert

Boiled Rice Pudding

A sweet dish of boiled rice with raisins, served hot with butter, molasses, sugar, or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Boiled Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rice thoroughly.

  2. Mix the rice with the seeded raisins.

  3. Place the mixture in a bag, tying it securely but leaving room for the rice to swell.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the bag in salted water for 2 hours.

  2. Serve hot with butter and molasses, or sugar and cream.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Molasses + sugartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Rice + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Raisin + molassestop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,577 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 absorbs liquid as it swells during boiling.
Large raisins
Add pockets of chewy sweetness and moisture distributed through the rice.

The step that matters

Leaving room in the bag. Rice swells considerably as it absorbs water. If the bag is tied too tightly, the grains are constrained and can burst or cook unevenly, so the bag needs space to expand.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Raisinthe original
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, butter, molasses, sugar, 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 rice pudding recipes

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

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