Name: Bice Soup
Ingredients: 4 oz Patna rice; salt to taste; cayenne to taste; mace to taste; 2 quarts white stock

Why it works: Rice and mace work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 932 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Bice Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

Boil the rice in water until tender.
Drain the rice in a sieve.

Make the soup

Add the drained rice to the boiling stock.
Simmer for a few minutes and season to taste.
Serve immediately.

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 + macetop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together932 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Patna rice: Supplies the starch and body that thicken the soup as the grains soften.
White stock: Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour and fills the soup.

“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.