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Buttered Rice

A simple dish of boiled rice topped with a buttered onion and green pepper sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Buttered Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Boil the rice and dry it.

  2. Heap the rice in a deep dish.

Make the sauce

  1. Fry the sliced onion in butter until light brown.

  2. Strain the onion out.

  3. Add the minced green pepper to the hot butter and cook until tender.

  4. Stir in the lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the rice and serve.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Rice + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

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

  5. 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

Rice
Forms the bulk of the dish and holds the buttery sauce poured over it.
Butter
Carries flavour and richness, and browns to add a nutty taste to the sauce.
Onion
Frying until light brown sweetens the butter and adds savoury aroma, then it is strained out.
Green pepper
Softens in the hot butter, adding a fresh, slightly sharp vegetable aroma to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the onion in butter until light brown. Browning develops sweet, savoury flavour through caramelization and browning reactions. Heat that is too high or cooking that goes too long can scorch the butter and onion, leaving a bitter taste that spoils the whole sauce.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, butter, pepper, lemon. 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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