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Drink

Rice-water, for Invalids

A simple drink made by boiling rice in water, optionally with raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and raisin work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 565 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Rice-water, for Invalids

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rice in several waters.

Make the rice water

  1. Boil the rice gently in 1 quart of water for 2.5 hours, stirring frequently.

  2. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve, rubbing through the glutinous part.

  3. Let the liquid cool before using.

Quicker version

  1. For a quicker version, boil 3 ounces of rice in 1 quart of water 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.

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 + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Releases starch into the water as it cooks, giving the liquid body and a slight thickness.

The step that matters

Boil gently and stir frequently. A hard boil can scorch the rice on the bottom and evaporate water unevenly. Frequent stirring keeps the grains from sticking and helps starch disperse evenly into the liquid.

“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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