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Dessert

Rich Rice Pudding

A sweet pudding made from cooked rice, sweet milk, maple syrup, eggs, sugar, coconut, dates, and a dash of salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,063 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Rich Rice Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cook the rice until tender, either in whole grain form or glue cooked style.

Bake

  1. Combine the ingredients in the order given and pour into a baking dish.

  2. Set the baking dish in a larger pan with cold or hot water.

  3. Place in the oven and bake until set like custard.

Serve

  1. Serve plain or with 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. Rice + coconuttop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,063 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  3. Coconut + datestop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together76 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Milk + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Maple syrup + datestop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard and bind the milk and rice into a firm, sliceable pudding.
Sweet milk
Provides the liquid that cooks with the eggs into a creamy custard base.
Cooked rice
Forms the body of the pudding, giving it bulk and a soft, tender texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the baked custard a tender texture.
Maple syrup
Adds sweetness and a distinct caramel-like flavor to the pudding.

The step that matters

Bake until set like custard. Eggs thicken as they heat, but overbaking makes them curdle and turn grainy and watery. Pull the pudding when the center is just set and still slightly wobbly, since it firms as it cools.

Swap the dates

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pumpkinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Datesthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, milk, maple syrup, egg, sugar, coconut. 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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