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Dessert

Rice Pudding

A sweet rice pudding with lemon, butter, egg yolks, and a browned egg white topping, served with a sauce of sugar, butter, wine, and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the rice soft in milk.

  2. Add the butter, egg yolks, and grated lemon rind.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 to 45 minutes.

Top and brown

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  2. Mix the sugar and lemon juice into the beaten egg whites.

  3. Spread the egg white mixture over the pudding.

  4. Return the pudding to the oven to brown.

Make the sauce

  1. Beat the sugar, butter, and whole egg for 45 minutes for the sauce.

  2. Heat the sauce until scalding, but do not boil.

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. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  3. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 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
Cooked soft in milk, it forms the body of the pudding.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to form a soft, creamy custard base.
Egg yolks
Enrich the pudding and help it set into a custard texture.
Egg whites
Beaten stiff, they form a light meringue topping that browns in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the meringue topping brown.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender texture to the pudding.

The step that matters

Heat the sauce until scalding, but do not boil. Egg-based sauces can curdle or turn grainy if overheated. Heating gently until just scalding thickens the sauce smoothly while keeping it silky.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, egg, butter, sugar, sauce, wine. 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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