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Dessert

Ground Rice Pudding

A sweet pudding made from ground rice, milk, almonds, lemon peel, sugar, and egg yolks, finished with a caramel sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,456 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Ground Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Combine the chopped almonds, lemon peel, and 1 pint of milk with 3 tablespoons of sugar in a saucepan.

  2. Bring to a boil, then slowly stir in the ground rice and boil for 10 minutes, stirring constantly.

  3. Pour the mixture into a mold and let it cool before turning it out.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, combine 2 ounces of white sugar with a little water and stir until melted and light golden brown.

  2. Add 1 pint of milk to the caramel, bring to a boil, then strain.

  3. Stir in the yolks of 4 eggs and cook over low heat until thickened.

  4. Once cooled, pour the sauce around the pudding.

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. Almond + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  3. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Ground rice
Forms the bulk of the pudding and thickens as it boils in the milk.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the rice absorbs and cooks in, giving the pudding its body.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they cook gently, giving it a smooth, coating texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and, when caramelized, gives the sauce its golden colour and flavour.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks over low heat. Egg yolks set when heated, and high heat or fast boiling can scramble them, leaving the sauce grainy. Gentle heat and constant stirring keep it smooth as it thickens.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, milk, sugar, rice, sauce, 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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