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Cream Rice Pudding

A sweet rice pudding made with milk, sugar, lemon rind, and rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cream Rice Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Put rice in a saucepan with cold water and salt.

  2. Boil until rice has absorbed the water (about 7 minutes).

  3. Add milk, grated lemon rind, and sugar.

  4. Stir and let boil gently on the back of the stove for 40 to 60 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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Its starch thickens the milk as it simmers, giving the pudding a creamy body.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the rice slowly absorbs, and the richness of the cream-style texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the pudding a softer, more tender finish.
Lemon rind
Adds aromatic oils that give the pudding a bright citrus fragrance.

The step that matters

Simmering on the back of the stove. Gentle heat lets the rice release starch and absorb milk slowly. Boiling hard or too fast can scorch the milk on the bottom and cause it to stick, so the pudding needs frequent stirring and a low, steady simmer.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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