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Dessert

Plain Rice Pudding

Plain Rice Pudding is a simple dish of rice cooked in milk with butter and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Plain Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and drain the rice.

  2. Place the rice in a baking dish.

Cook

  1. Add the milk and a tiny piece of butter.

  2. Do not stir the mixture.

  3. Cook slowly until the rice is tender.

  4. For a firmer pudding, use nine times as much milk as rice.

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 + 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
Its starch swells and thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the pudding body.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the rice absorbs, and its proteins and sugars help set and brown the pudding.
Butter
Adds fat for a richer flavour and a softer, smoother texture.

The step that matters

Do not stir the mixture. Stirring breaks up the rice grains and releases extra starch, which can make the pudding gluey instead of creamy. Leaving it undisturbed while it cooks slowly lets the grains soften intact and the milk thicken gently.

“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

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