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Rice-flour Soup

A soup made by adding rice flour to broth, seasoned with mace, cayenne, salt, optional curry, lemon, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Rice-flour Soup

Why it works: Rice and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,366 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Rice-flour Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix 8 ounces of fine rice flour with a little cold broth.

  2. Pour the mixture into 2 quarts of fast-boiling broth or gravy soup.

  3. Add mace, cayenne, and coarse sea salt if needed.

  4. Boil for 10 minutes.

  5. For added flavor, stir in 2 teaspoons of curry powder and the juice of ½ lemon.

  6. To make a white soup, add ¾ pint of thick cream if using veal stock.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

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

  2. Rice + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Rice + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together932 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Mace + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,009 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Fine rice flour
Thickens the broth as its starch swells when boiled, giving the soup body.
Broth or gravy soup
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavor of the soup.
Thick cream
Adds richness and fat, mellowing the soup and lightening its color for a white soup.

The step that matters

Pour the flour mixture into fast-boiling broth. Rice flour starch thickens by swelling in hot liquid. Adding the smooth cold mixture to boiling broth helps it disperse evenly, while adding it to a gentle simmer makes lumps more likely.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, flour, mace, cream):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, flour, mace, cream. 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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