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Dessert

Ground Rice Pudding, or Easter Pies

A sweet rice pudding baked into pie dishes, topped with currants.

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, or Easter Pies

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 rice base

  1. Boil 1 pint of milk with a few sticks of cinnamon.

  2. Wet ½ pound of ground rice with ⅓ cup of the remaining milk.

  3. Remove the cinnamon and stir in the rice.

  4. Boil until thick and soft.

  5. Pour into a crock and let cool slightly.

Assemble and bake

  1. Stir in ½ cup of butter, 7 ounces of sugar, salt, and 8 beaten eggs.

  2. Line pie dishes with a rice crust, pour in the mixture, and sprinkle currants on top.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 1 hour.

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. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard and add richness and structure as they cook.
Ground rice
Thickens the milk and forms the body of the pudding and its crust.
Milk
Provides the liquid base that the rice swells in and the custard sets from.
Butter
Adds fat for a softer, richer texture and flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps it brown lightly in the oven.

The step that matters

Boil until thick and soft. The rice must cook fully in the milk before the eggs go in. Undercooked starch stays grainy, and the pudding will not set evenly once baked.

Swap the currant

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

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

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