Name: Rice Cream
Ingredients: ½ cup rice; 1 quart water; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; rind of ½ orange or lemon

Why it works: Rice and orange are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,067 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rice Cream

Ingredients

½ cup rice
1 quart water
¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt
rind of ½ orange or lemon

Directions

Boil 1 quart of salted water in a pot.
Add ½ cup of well-washed rice and the rind of ½ orange or lemon.
Cook until the rice is tender.
Drain the rice, remove the peel, and mix lightly.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + orangetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,067 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice: Starch that softens as it cooks, thickening the liquid into a creamy texture.
Orange or lemon rind: Aromatic oils from the peel add a citrus fragrance to the cooked rice.

“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.