Skip to main content
Dessert

Cream Rice Pudding

A baked rice pudding made with milk, salt, cinnamon or sugar, nutmeg, and optional raisins or ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Cream 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. Soak the rice in the milk for half an hour.

  2. Add salt, cinnamon or sugar, and nutmeg.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a 300°F (150°C) oven for about an hour, until the rice thickens the milk into a creamy substance.

  2. Optionally, add raisins or ginger for variety.

  3. Serve with butter, maple sugar, or cream.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Nutmeg + raisintop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  5. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 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
Its starch thickens the milk as it bakes, giving the pudding a creamy body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the rice absorbs and slowly sets into a creamy custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown slightly at the surface.

The step that matters

Bake until creamy. The rice must soften and release its starch into the milk to thicken it. Baking long enough lets the starch gelatinise and the liquid turn creamy, while stopping too early leaves the pudding thin and the rice unevenly cooked.

Swap the raisin

The recipe marks raisin as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, rice, cinnamon, nutmeg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, rice, cinnamon, nutmeg. 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 →

You might also like

Rice CakeRice Cake120 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesRice CreamRice Cream43 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipes