Name: Rice Water
Ingredients: 6 ounces of rice; 2 quarts of cold water; sugar or honey to taste

Why it works: Rice and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,744 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rice Water

Ingredients

6 ounces of rice
2 quarts of cold water
sugar or honey to taste

Directions

Wash the rice thoroughly.
In a saucepan, combine the rice and cold water.
Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until the rice is fully cooked.
Strain the mixture through a fine strainer back into the saucepan.
If the mixture is too thick, add a little more water and warm it up.
Sweeten with sugar or honey to taste.

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.

Rice + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,744 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice: Starch released into the water thickens it and gives the liquid its body.
Cold water: Cooks the rice and dissolves its starch, forming the base liquid.

“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.