Name: Rice Soup
Ingredients: 5 cents worth of soup greens (chopped carrot, celery leaves, parsley, a leek, and a tomato); ½ tablespoon rice; 1 tablespoon butter; 2 quarts hot soup stock

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Rice Soup

Ingredients

5 cents worth of soup greens (chopped carrot, celery leaves, parsley, a leek, and a tomato)
½ tablespoon rice
1 tablespoon butter
2 quarts hot soup stock

Directions

Boil the soup greens in a saucepan with a little water.
Add the rice and butter.
Just before serving, remove the vegetables.
Pour in the hot soup stock and bring to a boil.

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.

Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,053 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,173 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,810 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,310 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Celery + leektop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,093 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice: Thickens the soup slightly as its starch releases during simmering, giving body to the broth.
Butter: Adds richness and a rounded flavour that carries the vegetable and stock notes.
Soup greens: Build the base flavour of the broth as they simmer in water.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, celery, parsley, leek, rice, butter):

Turnipfits better
Parsnipfits better
Shallotfits better
Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, celery, parsley, leek, rice, butter. 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.