Skip to main content
Dessert

Cheap Rice Pudding

A simple rice pudding made with rice, raisins, and optional apples, served with sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rice and raisin work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 565 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Cheap Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rice thoroughly.

  2. Mix the rice with the raisins and tie them in a well-floured cloth, leaving room for expansion.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the cloth for 1 hour and 45 minutes.

  2. For a variation, mix in 1 pound of peeled, cored, and quartered apples and boil for 1 hour and 15 minutes to 1 hour and 30 minutes.

  3. Serve the pudding with a very sweet sauce.

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 + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Raisin + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Rice + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,311 recipes

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

  4. Rice + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,396 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Raisin + saucetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together297 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

Rice
Forms the body of the pudding as it swells and softens during boiling.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Leaving room in the cloth for expansion. Rice absorbs water and swells as it cooks. If the cloth is packed tightly, the pudding can burst or cook unevenly, so space must be left inside the wrapping.

Swap the apple

The recipe marks apple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, raisin, sauce):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, raisin, sauce. 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 →

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesRice CakeRice Cake120 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipes