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Rice and Tomato Soup

A soup of rice, tomatoes, butter, and seasonings served over toasted whole wheat bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and 3,065 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Rice and Tomato Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Boil the rice in 2 quarts of water until tender.

  2. Season with salt.

  3. Add a generous lump of butter.

  4. Move the kettle to the side of the fire.

  5. Add the cooked and strained tomatoes, sweetened with a pinch of baking soda.

  6. Season with salt, pepper, and sugar.

Serve

  1. Pour the soup over toasted whole wheat bread.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Rice + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together3,065 recipes

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

  2. Rice + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together423 recipes

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

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Tomato + wheattop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together468 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Cooks down in the water to thicken the soup and give it body.
Cooked and strained tomatoes
Form the base of the soup, supplying acidity, flavor and most of the liquid body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, rounding out the tomato's sharp acidity.
Baking soda
Neutralizes some of the tomato's acidity, softening its sharpness.

The step that matters

Add the baking soda to the tomatoes. Baking soda reacts with acid and releases carbon dioxide, so a small pinch is enough to mellow tomato acidity. Too much leaves a soapy, metallic taste and can make the soup bubble over.

“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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