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Dessert

Cream Rice Pudding

A baked milk and rice pudding flavored with cinnamon or nutmeg, sweetened with sugar, and optionally studded with raisins or preserved ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and raisin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,390 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Cream Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Soak the rice in the milk for 30 minutes.

  2. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

Bake and serve

  1. Bake slowly for about 1 hour, until the rice thickens the milk into a creamy substance.

  2. Serve with butter, maple sugar, or 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. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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
Absorbs the milk as it cooks and softens, giving the pudding its body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into a creamy custard-like texture as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the flavour of the milk.

The step that matters

Bake slowly. Slow, gentle heat lets the rice soften and release starch while the milk thickens gradually, without scorching or boiling over. Rushing the bake can leave the milk runny or burnt on the bottom.

Swap the raisin

The recipe marks raisin as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, rice, sugar, cinnamon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, rice, 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.

More rice pudding recipes

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