Skip to main content
Dessert

Rice Pie

A sweet pie made with rice, milk, eggs, sugar, butter, cinnamon, raisins, baked in a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and raisin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,390 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Rice Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Wash the rice and place it in a furnace boiler with the milk.

  2. Cook until the rice is perfectly soft, then let it cool.

Assemble and bake

  1. Add the beaten eggs, sugar, butter, salt, cinnamon, and raisins to the cooled rice mixture.

  2. Pour the mixture into a pie crust and bake.

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. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Softens as it cooks and thickens the milk, giving the filling its body and texture.
Milk
Provides the liquid base that cooks the rice and sets into a creamy filling.
Eggs
Set when baked, binding the filling into a sliceable custard-like texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown during baking.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, softer mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Cook the rice until perfectly soft. Rice that is still firm will stay firm in the baked filling, because the starch must fully gelatinize in the liquid before the eggs are added. Fully softened rice also blends into a smooth, even custard rather than a grainy one.

Swap the raisin

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, egg, sugar, butter, cinnamon. 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 pie recipes

Apple 5 See all 36 →

You might also like

Rice CakeRice Cake120 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesRice CreamRice Cream43 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipes