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Dessert

Plain Boiled Rice Pudding

Plain boiled rice pudding is a simple dish of rice cooked in water, served with butter, sugar, or fruit preserves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Plain Boiled Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rice thoroughly.

  2. Tie the rice in a pudding cloth, leaving room for it to swell.

  3. Place the cloth in a saucepan of cold water.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil gently for 2 hours, tightening the cloth if it seems too loose.

  2. Serve with melted butter, cold butter and sugar, or stewed fruit, jam, or marmalade.

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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Starch that swells and softens as it absorbs water, forming the body of the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 2 hours, tightening the cloth if it seems too loose.. Rice swells as it absorbs water, so a loose cloth lets the grains spread and can cause the pudding to fall apart or cook unevenly. A gentle simmer cooks the rice through without bursting the cloth or breaking the grains apart.

“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

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