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Dessert

Rice Pudding

A custard-like dessert made from rice, milk, eggs, sugar, lemon, butter, and optional raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the pudding

  1. Boil rice in a custard kettle with water and salt until dry.

  2. Add milk, beaten egg yolks, and sugar; stir well.

  3. Mix in lemon juice, lemon rind, and butter.

  4. Optionally, add raisins before baking.

Bake and finish

  1. Transfer to a dish and bake at 300°F (150°C) until set.

  2. Beat egg whites with sugar and spread over the top.

  3. Brown in the oven.

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. Rice + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Cooked in water until dry, it forms the starchy body of the pudding.
Egg yolks
Coagulate on baking, setting the milk mixture into a creamy custard.
Milk
Provides the liquid and milk solids that make the pudding rich and tender.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the meringue topping stay glossy and stable.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar to form a meringue that bakes into a light, browned topping.
Butter
Adds fat for richer flavour and a smoother, more tender texture.

The step that matters

Browning the meringue topping. Egg whites whipped with sugar can weep or stay pale if underbaked or overbaked; the sugar browns through caramelisation and the proteins set, so watch closely until golden.

Swap the raisin

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

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

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