Name: Rice or Macaroni and Cheese
Ingredients: 2 cups boiled rice or macaroni; 1 cup grated cheese

Why it works: Rice and cheese work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 942 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rice or Macaroni and Cheese

Ingredients

2 cups boiled rice or macaroni
1 cup grated cheese

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Heat the boiled rice or macaroni in a pot.
Add enough grated cheese to flavor it.

Finish

If preferred, transfer to a baking dish and brown in the oven at 400°F (200°C) before serving.

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 + cheesetop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together942 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

Macaroni or boiled rice: Forms the bulk of the dish and provides its starchy, soft body.
Grated cheese: Adds savory flavor and, when heated, melts to coat the pasta or 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.