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Dessert

A Good Boiled Rice Pudding

A sweet pudding made by boiling rice with milk, sugar, lemon rind, almonds, eggs, and optional candied orange rind and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

A Good Boiled Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice base

  1. Combine the rice and milk in a pot.

  2. Heat slowly, allowing it to swell and simmer until soft and thick.

Add the custard ingredients

  1. Stir in the sugar, lemon rind, pounded almonds, and whisked eggs while the mixture is still hot.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the cooled mixture into a well-buttered basin or mold, filling it completely.

  2. Cover with a buttered paper and a floured cloth.

  3. Boil for exactly one hour.

  4. Allow to stand for 2 to 3 minutes before turning out.

  5. Serve with sweet sauce, fruit syrup, or fresh fruit compote.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

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

  3. Rice + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,456 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Whole rice
Swells and softens in the milk, providing the body and bulk of the pudding.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to create a soft, thick base for the pudding.
Eggs
Set when heated, binding the pudding and giving it a firm, sliceable texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavor of the lemon and almonds.
Lemon rind
Adds bright aroma and a light citrus note to the pudding.

The step that matters

Heating the rice and milk slowly. Slow heating lets the rice swell evenly and soften without scorching the milk on the bottom of the pot. Scorching gives a burnt taste, and uneven cooking leaves hard grains in the thick base.

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, milk, sugar, lemon, almond, egg, butter):

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

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