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Rice Soup, Italian

A creamy Italian rice soup with turnips, butter, stock, and grated Parmesan.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and turnip work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 824 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Rice Soup, Italian

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Wash and drain the rice.

  2. Place the rice in a saucepan with butter, stock, salt, and white pepper.

  3. Simmer gently until the rice is tender.

Prepare the turnips

  1. Cut the turnips into small pieces.

  2. Fry the turnips in butter until lightly browned.

  3. Drain the fat from the turnips.

  4. Stew the turnips in about 2 cups of stock.

Combine and serve

  1. Add the boiled rice to the turnips.

  2. Serve hot with grated Parmesan on the side.

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. Rice + turniptop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together824 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + parmesan cheesetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,163 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Rice + parmesan cheesetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together879 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

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

  5. White pepper + turniptop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together275 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the body of the soup and thickens it as its starch releases during simmering.
Turnips
Provide the main vegetable bulk and mild sweetness, with light browning from frying.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and carries flavor, and helps the turnips brown when fried.
Stock
Supplies the main liquid that cooks the rice and turnips into a soup.
Grated parmesan cheese
Adds salty, savory depth when sprinkled over the hot soup.

The step that matters

Frying the turnips until lightly browned. Browning through the Maillard reaction builds savory flavor. Turnips fried in too much heat can scorch, and under-frying leaves them tasting flat and watery in the stew.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, butter, turnip, parmesan cheese):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, butter, turnip, parmesan cheese. 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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