Name: Rice to Boil for Curry
Ingredients: 1 cup rice; water; ¼ teaspoon salt; 2 tablespoons butter (optional)

Why it works: Rice and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,645 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Rice to Boil for Curry

Ingredients

1 cup rice
water
¼ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter (optional)

Directions

Prepare

Pick the rice well and soak it in water for 15 minutes.

Boil and drain

Boil the rice quickly in salted water until tender but not soft.
Drain the rice.
Place the drained rice on a sieve over a heat source to dry.
Turn the rice gently with a fork to keep the grains separate.

Wash and keep warm

Wash the rice in warm water.
Cover the rice with boiling water.
Keep the rice warm for an hour.
Stir the rice over heat until dry but not hard.

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 + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,645 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

Rice: Its starch gelatinises in boiling water, giving the grains their tender, separate texture.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, coating the grains and carrying flavour.