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Dessert

Common Ground Rice Pudding

A baked rice pudding made with milk, rice, sugar, butter, eggs, and nutmeg or lemon zest.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Common Ground Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

Make the custard base

  1. In a saucepan, combine the milk, rice, sugar, and butter.

  2. Cook over medium heat until the mixture is warm.

  3. Beat the eggs in a bowl.

  4. Stir the beaten eggs into the warm mixture.

  5. Add nutmeg or lemon zest to taste.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a baking dish.

  2. Bake slowly for 30 minutes or until firm.

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. Milk + ricetop 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

Eggs
Beaten eggs set when baked, giving the pudding its firm, custard-like body.
Rice
Starch and body that soften in the warm milk and thicken the pudding as it cooks.
Milk
Provides the liquid that cooks the rice and forms the creamy base of the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown lightly at the surface.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, softer texture.

The step that matters

Bake slowly until firm. Eggs set at gentle heat; if the oven is too hot the eggs can curdle or turn grainy before the pudding is set through. Baking slowly keeps the custard smooth and evenly firm.

Swap the nutmeg

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

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

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