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Dessert

A Good Boiled Rice Pudding

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

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 rice and milk in a pot.

  2. Heat slowly until it simmers, cooking until the rice is soft and thick.

Add the flavourings and eggs

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

Boil and serve

  1. Let the mixture cool, then pour it into a thickly buttered basin or mold, filling it completely.

  2. Cover with a buttered paper and a floured cloth, then boil the pudding for exactly one hour.

  3. Allow it to stand for two to three minutes before turning it out.

  4. 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

Rice
Cooks down into a soft, thick body that gives the pudding its structure.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to form the creamy, moist base of the pudding.
Eggs
Set when cooked, binding the pudding and giving it a firmer texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding feel soft and rich.
Butter
Adds richness and helps keep the pudding from sticking to the mold.

The step that matters

Stirring in the eggs while the mixture is hot. Eggs thicken when heated, so adding them to a hot mixture while stirring helps them blend in evenly. Letting the eggs sit unmixed can leave uneven, lumpy patches in the pudding.

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.

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