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Dessert

A French Rice Pudding, or Gateau De Riz

A creamy rice pudding made with milk, butter, sugar, lemon rind, eggs, and baked with bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

A French Rice Pudding, or Gateau De Riz

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice base

  1. In a pot, gently swell the rice in the milk until tender.

  2. Add butter, sugar, salt, and lemon rind; simmer until rice is fully swollen.

  3. Remove from heat, let cool slightly, then stir in the egg yolks gradually.

Prepare the pan

  1. Coat a small copper stewpan with clarified butter, then drain excess.

  2. Sprinkle stale bread crumbs over the buttered pan, shaking off any excess.

Bake

  1. Whisk egg whites until stiff, then gently fold into the rice mixture.

  2. Pour the mixture into the prepared stewpan and bake without covering.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  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
Swells into tender grains that give the pudding its body and bulk.
Milk
Cooks with the rice to form the creamy, moist base of the pudding.
Egg yolks
Enrich the base and help it set into a custard-like texture.
Egg whites
Whisked to stiff foam, they lighten the mixture and help it rise in the oven.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, contributing to flavour and a tender texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and contributes to browning on the surface.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Stiff egg whites trap air that expands in the oven and lifts the pudding. Overmixing or deflating them with vigorous stirring loses that air, so the pudding comes out dense rather than light.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, rice, butter, sugar, bread, 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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