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Rice & Tomato Soup

A tomato-based soup with rice, onion, carrot, butter, flour, salt, and pepper, simmered and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,555 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Rice & Tomato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. In a small frying pan, melt the butter and cook the onion and carrot slowly for 20 minutes.

  2. In a stew pan, combine the tomatoes and water, and bring to a boil.

  3. Add the cooked vegetables to the tomato mixture.

  4. In the frying pan, mix the remaining butter with flour and cook until smooth and frothy, stirring constantly.

  5. Add the flour mixture to the stew pan and simmer for 30 minutes.

Strain and cook

  1. Pass the mixture through a sieve, pressing everything through except seeds and skins.

  2. Wash the rice and place it in a soup pot, pouring the strained mixture over it.

  3. Add salt and pepper, and cook slowly for 1 hour, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking.

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. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Tomato + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Tomato + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

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

  5. Rice + carrottop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,477 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
Absorbs liquid and swells, thickening the soup and giving it body.
Flour
Cooked in butter to form a roux that thickens the soup smoothly.
Tomatoes
Provide the main body, acidity and flavour of the soup.
Onion
Softened slowly in butter to build sweetness and savoury depth.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries flavour from the onion and carrot.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in butter. Stirring constantly until smooth and frothy cooks out the raw starch taste and lets the flour blend without lumps when added to the hot liquid.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, rice, carrot, butter, pepper, flour):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, rice, carrot, butter, pepper, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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