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Dessert

Iced Rice Pudding

A chilled dessert made from rice, milk, egg yolks, vanilla, and whipped cream, topped with orange compote.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Iced Rice Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Cook rice in boiling salted water until tender, then drain.

  2. Add hot milk to the rice and cook in a double boiler for 30 minutes.

  3. Press the mixture through a strainer.

  4. Beat egg yolks slightly.

  5. Add sugar to the beaten yolks.

  6. Add the hot rice mixture to the yolks and sugar.

  7. Cook the mixture over hot water until it thickens.

  8. Remove the mixture from heat and let it cool.

  9. Add vanilla extract.

Freeze and mold

  1. Freeze the mixture until it reaches a mushy consistency.

  2. Beat the frozen mixture well.

  3. Fold in the whipped cream.

  4. Fill a mold with the mixture.

  5. Pack the mold in ice and salt.

  6. Let the mold stand for 2 to 3 hours.

  7. Unmold the pudding.

Make the compote and serve

  1. Garnish with orange compote.

  2. Make a syrup by boiling sugar and water for 5 minutes.

  3. Add lemon juice to the syrup.

  4. Peel the oranges.

  5. Separate the oranges into sections.

  6. Cook the orange sections in the syrup for 3 minutes.

  7. Drain the cooked sections and chill them.

  8. Arrange the orange sections around the pudding.

  9. Pour the chilled syrup over the pudding before serving.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Vanilla + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  5. Vanilla + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Vanilla and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard when gently heated and enrich its texture and colour.
Rice
Provides the body of the pudding as its starch softens and thickens with milk.
Heavy cream
Whipped, it adds lightness and a creamy, fatty mouthfeel to the frozen pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and softens the frozen texture by lowering the freezing point.
Milk
Supplies the liquid that cooks the rice and forms the creamy custard base.
Oranges
Add fresh citrus aroma and acidity that contrast with the rich pudding.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard over hot water until it thickens. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat. If the water is too hot or the mixture is stirred poorly, the yolks can scramble and turn grainy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, vanilla, egg, cream, rice, orange, sugar. 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.

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