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Dessert

Currant Rice Pudding

A sweet rice pudding flavored with currants, lemon, and butter, finished with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Currant Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. In a saucepan, combine the rice and milk.

  2. Dredge the currants with flour and gradually stir them in.

  3. Add the sugar rubbed on the lemon and its juice, along with the butter in bits.

  4. Once the rice is swollen, mix in the beaten egg yolks.

Bake and serve

  1. Transfer to a deep baking dish and bake for 30 minutes.

  2. Sift powdered sugar on top before serving.

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

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

  5. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Starch swells in the milk, giving the pudding its body and soft, creamy texture.
Milk
Liquid that cooks the rice and forms the creamy base of the pudding.
Egg yolks
Coagulate as they heat, setting the pudding and adding richness.
Butter
Adds fat, which gives a smoother mouthfeel and richer flavour.
Currants
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit throughout the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the acidity of the lemon.

The step that matters

Mixing in the egg yolks. Yolks thicken by coagulating as they heat, but if they meet very hot rice too quickly or are stirred vigorously, they can scramble. Mixing them in gently keeps the pudding smooth and evenly set.

Swap the currant

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

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

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

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