Name: Boiled Rice Pudding
Ingredients: 1 cup rice; 1 teaspoon ground pimento; Melted butter; Sugar to taste

Why it works: Rice and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,645 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled Rice Pudding

Ingredients

1 cup rice
1 teaspoon ground pimento
Melted butter
Sugar to taste

Directions

Prepare

Wash the rice thoroughly.
Mix the rice with the ground pimento.
Tie the mixture loosely in a cloth.

Cook and serve

Boil for 1 hour.
Serve with melted butter and sugar to taste.

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.

Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,645 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,744 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice: Its starch swells as it cooks, giving the pudding its body and soft texture.
Ground pimento: Adds a warm, spiced aroma and flavor to the rice.
Melted butter: Adds fat and richness to the finished pudding.
Sugar: Adds sweetness to the finished pudding.

“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.