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Plain Boiled Rice

Plain boiled rice is cooked by washing, boiling in salted water with lemon, draining, rinsing, then steaming in buttered paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Plain Boiled Rice

Why it works: Rice and lemon 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 ↓

Plain Boiled Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rice thoroughly in cold water.

Boil

  1. Place the rice in a pan of boiling salted water with a squeeze of lemon juice.

  2. Boil rapidly without a lid for about 12 minutes.

  3. Drain the rice.

  4. Rinse the rice with cold water.

Steam

  1. Place the rice in a pan lined with buttered paper.

  2. Cover the pan.

  3. Steam the rice for 30 minutes.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Rice + lemontop 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

Fatna rice
Its starch swells as the grains cook, giving the main body and texture of the dish.

The step that matters

Boil rapidly without a lid. Rapid boiling in plenty of salted water cooks the grains evenly and keeps them from clumping, while leaving the lid off lets the water stay vigorous and steam escape.

“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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