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Rice Southern

A simple southern-style rice cooked, drained, buttered, and seasoned with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,645 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Rice Southern

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Wash the rice in 3 waters and rub it dry on a clean cloth.

  2. Sprinkle the rice into a deep saucepan of boiling water, ensuring enough water for the rice to move freely.

  3. Do not cover, and check the grains after 20 minutes for doneness.

  4. If not cooked, wait an additional 2-3 minutes.

  5. Remove from heat and drain in a colander.

Dry and season

  1. In a saucepan, combine the drained rice with butter (½ tablespoon per cup of rice) and plenty of salt.

  2. Let it stand uncovered in a warm place, occasionally turning it with a fork.

  3. After about 40 minutes, the rice should be dry with each grain standing alone.

  4. If overcooked, rinse with cold water, shake dry, and then proceed with butter and salt.

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 + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Its starch softens in boiling water to form the tender body of the dish, with grains that stay separate when drained.
Butter
Its fat coats the cooked grains, adding richness and helping them stay separate and glossy.

The step that matters

Check the rice at 20 minutes and do not let it overcook. Rice grains keep softening after they are tender, and overcooked grains burst and turn mushy, losing the separate, dry texture the dish depends on.

“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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