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Dessert

Cream Rice Pudding

A sweet rice pudding made with milk, sugar, and butter, flavored with nutmeg and thickened with corn starch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and corn match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 933 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cream Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Combine rice, sugar, and sweet milk in a pudding dish.

Bake

  1. Dot the top with bits of butter and sprinkle with nutmeg.

  2. Bake slowly until the rice is cooked.

  3. Dissolve corn starch in a little milk and stir it into the pudding.

  4. If the pudding is too thick, add a little more milk.

Serve

  1. Serve hot or cold.

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 + corntop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Rice + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rice
Provides the body of the pudding as it cooks and softens in the milk.
Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base that cooks the rice and sets into a creamy custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown lightly on top.
Corn starch
Thickens the liquid so the pudding becomes smoother and creamier.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the topping, aiding browning and flavor.

The step that matters

Dissolve corn starch in a little milk and stir it into the pudding.. Cornstarch must be fully dissolved in cold liquid before being added; otherwise it clumps and thickens unevenly instead of giving a smooth, creamy texture.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, sugar, milk, butter, corn):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Gingerfits less well
  4. Turmericfits less well

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