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Parched Rice

A simple dish of toasted rice cooked in salted water and served with cream and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Parched Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Toast the rice in a dry pan until it turns a nice brown, similar to coffee.

  2. Bring a pot of salted water to a boil.

Cook and serve

  1. Add the toasted rice to the boiling water and cook until fully done, without stirring too much to avoid breaking the grains.

  2. Serve the rice with cream and sugar.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Rice + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. 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 that cooks into the main body of the dish; toasting adds a nutty, coffee-like aroma.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, softening the flavour of the cooked grains.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the toasted, slightly bitter notes of the rice.

The step that matters

Toasting the rice in a dry pan. Dry heat browns the rice through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation, building the coffee-like flavour. Pale rice tastes flat, and rice browned too far turns bitter and burnt.

“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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