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Dessert

Rice Pudding

A baked rice pudding with lemon, egg, and optional raisins, butter, bread crumbs, or peaches.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

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.

Make the rice base

  1. Boil the rice in a custard kettle with water until dry.

  2. Dissolve cornstarch in milk and add to the rice; boil again.

  3. Beat egg yolks with sugar, stir into the rice mixture, and add lemon juice and rind.

Bake and serve

  1. Place in a buttered dish and bake at 300°F (150°C) until set.

  2. Spread beaten egg whites mixed with sugar on top and brown in the oven.

  3. Optionally, add raisins before baking or layer with butter, bread crumbs, and peaches.

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. Rice + milktop 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
Forms the bulk of the pudding and absorbs the liquid as it cooks.
Milk
Provides the liquid base and creamy texture of the pudding.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and enrich the texture as they set.
Cornstarch
Thickens the milk so the rice mixture holds together.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the meringue brown.
Egg whites
Form a sweet meringue topping that browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Baking at a moderate temperature sets the egg yolk custard gently; too much heat can curdle the eggs and leave the pudding grainy or watery.

Swap the raisin

The recipe marks raisin as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, milk, egg, sugar, lemon, butter, bread):

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

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