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To Roil Rice for Curry

Rice boiled with lemon juice, drained, rinsed, dried, and served with curry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,366 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

To Roil Rice for Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. In a large pot, add boiling water and lemon juice.

  2. While the water is boiling, gradually add the rice, stirring occasionally.

  3. Boil for about 12 minutes, then pour the rice into a sieve over a basin.

Rinse and serve

  1. Discard the water that drains through and rinse the rice with warm water to separate the grains.

  2. Place the rice on a hot dish and keep it near the fire or in the oven to dry.

  3. Serve the rice in a wall around the curry or in a separate dish.

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. Lemon + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Patua rice
Forms the bulk of the dish; its starch gives the cooked grains their body.
Lemon juice
Adds a little acidity and may help the grains stay separate while boiling.

The step that matters

Rinsing the rice after draining. Warm water rinses off surface starch so the grains separate rather than clumping together. Drying the rice on a hot dish afterwards lets surface moisture evaporate so the grains stay fluffy.

“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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