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Rice-balls Garnished with Cranberries

Rice balls served with sweet cranberry sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and cranberry share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 37 recipes. Both carry trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rice-balls Garnished with Cranberries

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the rice until tender.

  2. Mold the cooked rice in cups.

Serve

  1. Serve each person one rice ball in a saucer.

  2. Pour 1 to 2 tablespoons of sweet cranberry sauce over each rice ball.

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 + cranberrytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together37 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Rice + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,396 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Cranberry + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together480 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Cooked rice's starch makes the grains cling together so they can be pressed into a shaped ball.
Sweet cranberry sauce
Adds sweetness and tartness to the plain rice and moistens each ball.

The step that matters

Mold the cooked rice in cups. The rice must be warm and packed firmly enough for the grains to stick together. Loosely packed rice falls apart when it is lifted out of the cup.

Swap the cranberry

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Cranberrythe original
  4. Limefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, sauce. 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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