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Dessert

Rice Pudding

A baked rice pudding made with milk, rice, butter, sugar, eggs, lemon, and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the rice base

  1. Combine milk and rice in a pot.

  2. Simmer slowly until thick and rice is tender.

  3. Stir in butter, sugar, egg yolks, and salt while hot.

Bake and finish

  1. Pour mixture into a shallow pudding dish lined with pastry and bake at 350°F (175°C) until light brown.

  2. Beat egg whites with powdered sugar and lemon juice.

  3. Cover pudding with the beaten egg white mixture.

  4. Return to oven for 5 minutes until set.

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
Starch that swells and thickens the milk into a creamy, pudding-like body as it simmers.
Milk
Liquid that the rice absorbs and cooks in, forming the creamy base.
Egg yolks
Add richness and, when heated, help thicken and set the pudding custard.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar to form a foam that bakes into a light, set topping.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, more tender mouthfeel.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the topping brown lightly in the oven.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly until thick and rice is tender. Rice must fully hydrate and soften while the milk thickens; cooking too fast can scorch the milk on the pot base or leave the grains firm. Stirring the thickened base while hot before adding the yolks keeps the eggs smooth rather than curdled.

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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