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Rice Pudding with Fruit

A sweet rice pudding cooked with milk, fruit, and sugar, served with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,645 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Rice Pudding with Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. In a pot, swell the rice in milk over the fire for 15 minutes.

  2. Drain the rice and spread it over a floured cloth.

Shape and boil

  1. Add the currants, gooseberries, or sliced apples and sugar to the rice.

  2. Carefully draw the cloth up and tie it securely but loosely.

  3. Boil the pudding for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Turn out the pudding and serve with sweetened melted butter.

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

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

  2. Currant + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

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

  5. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Swells in milk to form the soft, starchy body of the pudding.
Currants or gooseberries or sliced apples
Add tartness and moisture that contrast with the sweet, creamy rice.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tartness of the fruit.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth securely but loosely. Rice swells as it cooks, so a cloth tied too tightly can restrict expansion and burst or squeeze the pudding, while one tied too loosely lets water seep in and make it soggy.

Swap the currant

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

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

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

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