Name: Rice and Gravy
Ingredients: gravy from roasted mutton or beef; 1 cup well-boiled rice

Why it works: Mutton and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,019 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Rice and Gravy

Ingredients

gravy from roasted mutton or beef
1 cup well-boiled rice

Directions

Let the gravy sit until the fat forms a layer on top.
Remove the fat from the gravy.
Stir 1 cup of well-boiled rice into the gravy until combined.

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.

Mutton + ricetop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,019 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Gravy from roasted mutton or beef: Provides the main liquid and meaty flavor that coats and seasons the rice.
Well-boiled rice: Forms the body of the dish, absorbing the gravy so it becomes a thick, spoonable mixture.

“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.