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Rice Pudding

A sweet dish made by boiling rice with water, then adding fruit and sweetening with sauce, sugar, or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Wash the rice and tie it in a cloth, allowing room for it to swell.

  2. Place the rice in a saucepan of cold water and boil for 1 hour.

  3. Remove the rice, untie the cloth, and stir in the fruit.

  4. Tie the cloth tightly again and return it to the water for another hour or longer.

Serve

  1. Serve with sweet sauce for dried fruit or with sugar and cream/milk for fresh fruit.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  5. Sauce + sugartop 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

Rice
Forms the body of the pudding as its starch swells and softens during long boiling.
Fresh fruit
Adds sweetness, moisture and fruity flavour to the rice as it cooks.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth with room to swell. Rice absorbs water and expands greatly as it cooks. If the cloth is tied too tightly the first time, the grains are constrained and the pudding can burst or cook unevenly.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Raisinthe original
  4. Avocadofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, sauce, sugar, cream. 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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