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Dessert

Ground Rice Pudding

A sweet pudding made from ground rice, milk, sugar, butter, and eggs, flavored with lemon peel.

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

Ground Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice mixture

  1. Boil 1 pint of milk with a small piece of lemon peel.

  2. Mix ¼ pound of ground rice with ½ pint of milk, 2 ounces of sugar, and 1 ounce of butter.

  3. Add the mixture to the boiling milk, stirring constantly.

Finish and bake

  1. Remove from heat, break in 2 eggs, and continue stirring.

  2. Butter a pie dish, pour in the mixture, and bake until done.

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. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  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

Ground rice
Thickens the milk as its starch swells, giving the pudding body.
Eggs
Set during baking to add structure and a creamy, custard-like texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the rice cooks into and bakes around.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the baked surface light browning.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Adding the rice mixture to the boiling milk. Stirring constantly keeps the ground rice from settling and clumping on the bottom of the pan, where it could scorch. Even dispersal lets the starch thicken the milk evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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