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Dessert

Boiled Puddings

A boiled pudding made with rice, suet, raisins, candied peel, and served with a sherry sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Combine milk and rice in a pot and cook for 1 hour or more until rice is tender.

Make the pudding

  1. In a separate bowl, mix suet, sugar, candied peel, sultana raisins, and eggs.

  2. Combine the rice mixture with the suet mixture and stir well.

  3. Pour the mixture into a pudding cloth or mold and tie securely.

  4. Boil the pudding for 2 ½ hours.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, mix sherry, sugar, egg yolks, and a little lemon juice in a bowl.

  2. Serve the pudding with the sauce poured over it.

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 + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Rice + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set firm as the pudding cooks.
Suet
Adds richness and fat, giving the pudding a tender, moist texture.
Rice
Provides the body of the pudding once cooked until tender.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to soften it and add moisture.
Sultana raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pudding.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sherry sauce and give it a smooth, rich body.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding for 2 ½ hours. The pudding must be sealed tightly in its cloth or mold and kept at a steady boil. Water entering the wrap makes it soggy, and uneven heat can leave the centre undercooked, so the eggs and suet may not set properly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, rice, sugar, raisin, egg, sherry, sauce):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, rice, sugar, raisin, egg, sherry, sauce. 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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