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Dessert

Plain Rice Pudding

A simple rice pudding made by boiling rice with water, butter, sugar, and optional spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Wash and pick the rice.

  2. If desired, mix in the ground pimento.

  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. Serve with butter and sugar, or milk.

  3. Add lemon peel if desired.

  4. Serve with salt and butter.

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 softens and swells during long boiling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the finished pudding.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the cooked rice.
Milk
Adds creaminess and moisture when served with the rice.

The step that matters

Tie the rice in a cloth, leaving room for it to swell. Rice absorbs water and expands considerably as it cooks. If the cloth is packed tightly, the grains cannot swell freely, and the pudding may become cramped or burst the cloth.

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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