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Rice Cakes

Fried cakes made from boiled rice, cheese, parsley, breadcrumbs, tomato sauce, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Rice Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice mixture

  1. Boil the rice in stock until it absorbs as much liquid as possible.

  2. Add cheese, parsley, brown bread crumbs, tomato sauce, salt, and pepper.

  3. Bind the mixture with the egg yolks and mix thoroughly.

Shape and fry

  1. Form the mixture into cakes.

  2. Brush the cakes with egg white, roll in breadcrumbs, and fry until golden brown.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Rice + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

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

  3. Cheese + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  5. Parsley + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,398 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Absorbs the stock and forms the body of the cakes, giving them their soft, starchy interior.
Egg yolks
Bind the mixture so the cakes hold their shape when formed.
Egg white
Helps the breadcrumb coating stick to the outside of the cakes.
Brown bread crumbs
Add body to the mixture and help it hold together.
Cheese
Adds savoury flavour and richness to the cakes.

The step that matters

Boil the rice until it absorbs the stock. Rice that is under-absorbed leaves the mixture too wet to bind and shape, while the starch released during boiling is what helps the cakes hold together.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, cheese, bread, tomato, sauce, pepper, egg):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Celeryfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, cheese, bread, tomato, sauce, pepper, egg. 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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