Name: Rice Coffee
Ingredients: 2 tablespoons brown rice; 1 pint boiling water; Sugar to taste; Boiled milk to serve

Why it works: Rice and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rice Coffee

Ingredients

2 tablespoons brown rice
1 pint boiling water
Sugar to taste
Boiled milk to serve

Directions

Prepare

Roast the brown rice as you would coffee beans.
Grind the roasted rice.

Brew and serve

In a pot, combine the ground rice with 1 pint of boiling water.
Keep the mixture in a hot place for 10 minutes.
Serve with sugar and boiled milk.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,374 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together77,875 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,744 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Brown rice: Roasting browns the rice, giving the drink its toasty, coffee-like flavour.
Boiling water: Extracts flavour from the ground roasted rice as it steeps.
Boiled milk: Adds creaminess and softens the roasted, slightly bitter taste.

“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.