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Plain Boiled Rice

Plain boiled rice is a simple dish of rice cooked in salted water, optionally served with sugar, butter or molasses.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Plain Boiled Rice

Why it works: Sugar and molasses are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,225 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Plain Boiled Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick and wash the rice thoroughly.

  2. Tie the rice in a pudding bag, leaving plenty of room for it to swell.

Cook

  1. Place the bag in a kettle of boiling water and add salt to taste.

  2. Boil for 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with sugar and butter or molasses 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.

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.

  1. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

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

  5. Butter + molassestop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,123 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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, absorbing water and swelling into tender, separate grains as it cooks.

The step that matters

Leave room in the pudding bag. Rice swells considerably as it absorbs water. If the bag is packed tightly, the grains are constricted and cook unevenly, and the bag may burst in the boiling water.

“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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