Skip to main content
Dessert

Rice Pudding

A sweet pudding made from rice, butter or beef suet, nutmeg, sugar, milk, egg yolks, and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice pudding

  1. Boil the rice in a cloth for 1 hour.

  2. Stir the rice with butter or beef suet, nutmeg, and sugar.

  3. Tie it up again and boil for another hour.

  4. Pour melted butter over the pudding.

Make the custard and serve

  1. Mix rice flour into 1 pint of milk, stirring constantly over heat until thick.

  2. Add ¼ pound of butter, ½ pint of milk, egg yolks, sugar, and grated lemon peel.

  3. Boil in basins or cups.

  4. Pour wine sauce over them.

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 + milktop 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. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 absorbs liquid as it cooks.
Rice flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, stable base as it heats.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help set the custard as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, tender texture.
Milk
Provides the liquid that thickens into the custard.

The step that matters

Stirring the rice flour and milk over heat. Stirring constantly keeps the starch dispersed so it thickens evenly instead of forming lumps or scorching on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, butter, nutmeg, sugar, flour, milk, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, butter, nutmeg, sugar, flour, milk, egg. 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

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesRice CakeRice Cake120 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes