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Dessert

Russian Seed, or Ground Rice Pudding

A simple rice pudding made by boiling rice with milk, lemon peel, and cinnamon until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,137 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Russian Seed, or Ground Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the rice in 2 cups of milk with lemon peel and cinnamon.

  2. Cook until the rice is tender and the mixture thickens.

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 + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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 sets as it cooks, thickening the milk into a pudding.
Milk
Forms the cooking liquid that the rice absorbs, giving the pudding its creamy body.

The step that matters

Cooking until tender and thickened. Milk sugars and proteins scorch easily on the bottom of the pan, so keep the heat gentle and stir. The rice starch thickens as it swells, so judge doneness by tender grains and a thickened mixture.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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