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Dessert

Ground Rice Pudding

A sweet pudding made from ground rice, milk, sugar, and egg, baked until set.

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

Ground Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil the milk, lemon rind, and butter together.

  2. Strain the mixture over the ground rice, which has been smoothly mixed with cold milk.

  3. Add salt and return to the pan.

  4. Stir over gentle heat and cook until it leaves the sides of the pan clean.

Finish and bake

  1. Remove from heat, add sugar, and when slightly cooled, mix in the yolk of the egg and the stiffly whisked egg white.

  2. Turn into a well-greased pie dish and bake for 20 minutes.

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. Milk + buttertop 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

Ground rice
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the pudding its body and creamy texture.
Egg
Adds richness and, with the whisked white, lightens and sets the pudding as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and adds a little browning in the oven.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the ground rice thickens into a pudding.

The step that matters

Cooking the ground rice until it leaves the sides of the pan clean. Ground rice starch must be fully cooked and thickened over gentle heat, or the pudding stays runny and tastes raw. Stirring gently prevents scorching and lumps on the base of the pan.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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

More rice pudding recipes

Baked 88Apple 84with Meringue 40Boiled 38French 30Lemon 29 See all 1,220 →

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