Skip to main content
Dessert

To Serve Cold Rice Pudding

A baked or boiled pudding made from stale bread, flour, currants, suet, sugar, and cinnamon, served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,341 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Serve Cold Rice Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Soak the bread in plenty of water overnight, with a plate on top to keep it submerged.

  2. The next morning, pour off the water and squeeze out excess moisture from the bread.

  3. Mash the soaked bread well and mix in the flour, currants, suet, sugar, and cinnamon.

Bake or boil

  1. Grease a baking dish with a bit of suet and pour the mixture into it.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for two hours.

  3. Alternatively, tie the mixture in a floured cloth and boil in water for the same time.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Currant + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Bread + cinnamontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,705 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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

Stale bread
Forms the body of the pudding and absorbs moisture, giving it a soft, pudding-like crumb.
Flour
Helps bind the soaked bread and suet into a mixture that holds its shape.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning on the surface during baking.
Currants
Add chewy pockets of fruit sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Squeezing out the soaked bread. Bread left too wet holds excess water, which can make the mixture loose and the pudding soggy or slow to set. Squeezing out the excess moisture keeps the texture firm enough to hold together when baked or boiled.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, sugar, 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.

You might also like

Bread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipes