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Dessert

Rice Pudding

A sweet rice pudding cooked with milk, optionally enriched with eggs, sugar, nutmeg, and butter, served with butter, sugar, or preserved fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Bake

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a deep dish, combine rice and skim milk.

  3. Bake for 1.5 hours until rice is tender.

Boil

  1. For boiling, place ½ pound of rice in a cloth bag and add to boiling water.

  2. Boil for 1 hour and 15 minutes until rice swells.

Serve

  1. Turn out rice and serve with cold butter and sugar, boiled milk with sugar and nutmeg, or preserved fruit.

  2. For a richer pudding, mix in beaten eggs, sugar, nutmeg, and butter or suet after boiling.

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

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

  4. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  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
Swells and softens as it cooks, giving the pudding its body and bulk.
Skim milk
Cooks with the rice to form the creamy liquid that gives the pudding its moisture.
Eggs
Set when heated, adding structure and richness to the pudding.
Butter
Adds fat, which contributes richness and a smoother mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Boil the rice in a loose cloth bag. Rice grains absorb water and swell as they cook. A bag tied with room to expand lets them swell fully, while a packed bag can leave grains firm and uneven.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, milk, egg, sugar, butter, currant):

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

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