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Dessert

Rice Pudding

A baked rice pudding with butter, sugar, eggs, lemon zest, and a topping of beaten egg whites and powdered sugar.

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

Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the rice base

  1. Combine 1 quart of milk and 1 cup of rice in a pot.

  2. Simmer slowly until thick and the rice is tender.

  3. Stir in 1 tablespoon of butter, 3 tablespoons of sugar, and 3 egg yolks while hot.

  4. Add salt to taste.

Bake and top

  1. Pour the mixture into a shallow pudding dish lined with rich pastry.

  2. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until light brown.

  3. Beat 3 egg whites with 6 tablespoons of powdered sugar and the juice of 1 lemon.

  4. Cover the top of the pudding with the egg white mixture.

  5. Return to the oven for 5 minutes.

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 + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  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
Thickens into a creamy body as it simmers and softens in the milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the rice cooks in and turns into a creamy custard.
Egg yolks
Enrich and set the pudding, giving it a rich, smooth texture when heated.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar and lemon juice, they form a light topping that browns in the oven.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the egg white topping and helps it hold its shape while baking.

The step that matters

Simmering the rice in the milk. Heat must be low and steady, and the milk must be stirred often. Milk scorches and sticks to the pot easily, and rice starch needs gentle, prolonged heat to swell and soften fully.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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