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Dessert

Boiled Rice Pudding

A sweet pudding made by cooking rice in milk, butter, eggs, sugar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Boiled Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice

  1. Gently stew the rice in the new milk until tender.

  2. Pour the rice into a basin and stir in the butter.

  3. Let it cool.

Mix and cook

  1. Beat the eggs and add them to the rice along with the sugar, salt, and flavouring, then mix well.

  2. Transfer the pudding to a buttered basin.

  3. Tie it down with a cloth.

  4. Plunge it into boiling water.

  5. Boil for 1½ hours.

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

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

  2. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  3. Rice + nutmegtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the bulk of the pudding and softens into a creamy, tender body as it cooks in milk.
New milk
Cooks with the rice to create the liquid base that gives the pudding its creamy moisture.
Eggs
Set during boiling to bind the pudding and give it a firmer, custard-like structure.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, contributing to a smooth texture and mouthfeel.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the pudding brown slightly at the surface.

The step that matters

Plunge into boiling water and keep it boiling. The pudding must be sealed in its cloth and submerged in water kept at a steady boil for the full time. Steady heat lets the eggs set evenly through the pudding, while a drop in temperature can leave the centre loose or the texture uneven.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Turmericfits less well
  4. Gingerfits less well

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