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Dessert

Plain Boiled Rice Pudding

A simple boiled rice pudding made with rice, pimento, butter, sugar, milk, and optional lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Plain Boiled Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and pick the rice.

  2. Mix in the pimento, but use it sparingly.

  3. Tie the rice in a cloth, leaving room for it to swell.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the rice in a large pot of water for 1 to 2 hours.

  2. Once cooked, serve with butter and sugar, or with milk.

  3. Add lemon peel if desired.

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. Butter + milktop 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
Forms the body of the pudding as its starch swells and softens while boiling.
Pimento
Adds a mild, aromatic flavour; used sparingly so it does not overpower the rice.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and gives a smooth mouthfeel.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the plain starchy rice.
Milk
Adds moisture and creaminess when served with the cooked rice.

The step that matters

Tie the rice in a cloth, leaving room for it to swell. Rice absorbs water and expands substantially as it cooks. Without enough room in the cloth, the swollen grains can burst the cloth or become compressed and unevenly cooked.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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