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Boiled Rice

A simple boiled rice dish cooked with water, milk, and optional butter, sugar, or fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Boiled Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rice in a strainer.

  2. Combine the rice, water, and salt in a saucepan.

Cook

  1. Bring the mixture to a slow boil until the water evaporates.

  2. Pour in the milk and stir gently from the bottom to avoid smashing the rice.

  3. Cover the saucepan.

  4. Move the saucepan to a cooler part of the fire.

  5. Let the rice absorb the milk.

Serve

  1. Serve with additional milk.

  2. Add fruit and sugar if desired.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  3. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and sugar 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

Rice
Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs the liquid as it cooks, becoming tender.
Water
Cooks the rice by steaming and simmering until the grains soften and the water is absorbed.
Milk
Adds creaminess and richness as the rice absorbs it near the end of cooking.

The step that matters

Pour in the milk and stir gently from the bottom. Stirring gently keeps the grains from breaking and releasing excess starch, which would make the rice gummy and mushy rather than tender and separate.

“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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