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Scrambled Rice and Bacon

A dish of cooked rice mixed with beaten eggs, seasoned, and cooked in bacon fat, served with bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,379 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Scrambled Rice and Bacon

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the bacon

  1. Fry or bake the bacon until crisp.

  2. Pour off half the fat and keep the bacon warm.

Scramble and serve

  1. Mix the eggs with the rice and add salt and pepper to taste.

  2. Pour the mixture into the hot bacon fat in the frying pan and scramble.

  3. Serve in a mound on a hot platter and surround with the bacon.

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

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

  2. Rice + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,350 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the rice together and set into soft, tender curds as they scramble.
Cooked rice
Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs flavor from the bacon fat and seasoning.
Bacon
Adds salty, smoky flavor and crisp texture, and its rendered fat cooks the rice.

The step that matters

Scrambling the rice and egg mixture in the bacon fat. Eggs turn rubbery if overcooked over high heat. Scrambling gently over moderate heat keeps the curds soft while the rice heats through evenly.

“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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