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Rice Italienne

A simple Italian-style rice dish flavored with butter, beef extract, cayenne, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,265 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Rice Italienne

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Boil the rice as directed in the previous recipe.

  2. Rinse the rice with boiling water.

  3. Return the rice to the kettle it was cooked in.

Season and serve

  1. Pour over the rice a sauce made of melted butter, beef extract, and cayenne.

  2. Stir the sauce in lightly with a fork to avoid breaking the rice.

  3. Cover and keep hot for about 5 minutes before serving.

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 + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,265 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

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

  3. Butter + beeftop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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 absorbs the butter sauce as the base texture.
Melted butter
Adds fat and moisture, coating the grains and carrying flavour through the rice.
Beef extract
Adds concentrated savoury flavour to the butter sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the sauce lightly with a fork. Rice grains are fragile once cooked, and vigorous stirring breaks them and releases surface starch, making the rice gummy and mushy. Gentle folding keeps the grains whole and evenly coated with the butter sauce.

“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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