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Dessert

Very Good Rice Pudding

A baked rice pudding made with rice, water, cream, lemon zest, sugar, butter, currants, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Very Good Rice Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Put the rice in a quart of water and simmer gently for 20 minutes.

  2. Drain the rice and return it to the pot with the cream and salt.

Mix and bake

  1. Add the lemon zest, sugar, butter, currants, and beaten egg yolks.

  2. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish.

  3. Bake for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Serve with sifted sugar and sauce.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  4. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Starch that softens during simmering and thickens the pudding as it bakes.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, giving the pudding a soft, creamy texture.
Egg yolks
Set during baking to bind the pudding and give it a custard-like structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning on the baked surface.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Currants
Add pockets of concentrated fruit sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks to the warm rice. Egg yolks set when heated, so they should be stirred in gently and evenly. Adding them to very hot rice without mixing well can cause uneven or scrambled bits, while thorough mixing keeps the pudding smooth before it bakes.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, cream, lemon, sugar, butter, egg. 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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