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Dessert

Baked Rice Pudding

A baked dessert made from rice, milk, sugar, salt, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Rice and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,137 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Baked 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.

Cook the rice

  1. Boil 2 gallons of water.

  2. Wash the rice and add it to the boiling water with the salt.

  3. Boil for 20 minutes, then strain off any remaining water.

Make the pudding

  1. Grease a baking dish.

  2. Mix the rice with the milk, sugar, and cinnamon.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into the baking dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  3. Cinnamon + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

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
Provides the starchy body that gives the pudding its bulk and soft, tender texture.
Milk
Supplies the liquid that cooks into a creamy, custard-like base as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown during baking.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma and flavour to the pudding.

The step that matters

Draining the rice. Leftover water dilutes the milk and sugar, so the pudding may bake up thin or watery. Draining well keeps the liquid balance right for a creamy set.

“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.

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