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Savory Rice

A baked rice dish with tomatoes, cheese, butter, and onion.

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 cooks put them together in 3,065 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Savory Rice

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Cook and brown the rice

  1. Add 2 teaspoons of salt to 3 quarts of boiling water in a large pot and cook the rice until soft but not broken.

  2. Drain and dry the rice.

  3. Melt butter in a saucepan.

  4. Brown the onion in the melted butter.

  5. Remove the onion from the saucepan.

  6. Add the rice to the saucepan and stir until browned.

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Heat the tomatoes in another pan for 20 minutes.

  2. Rub the heated tomatoes smooth.

  3. Season the tomatoes with salt and pepper.

  4. Stir the seasoned tomatoes into the rice.

Bake

  1. Sprinkle cheese over the mixture.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a buttered baking dish.

  3. Cover with buttered crumbs.

  4. Brown in the oven at 350°F (175°C).

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 + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  3. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  4. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  5. Rice + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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 gives it a soft, starchy body.
Tomato pulp
Adds moisture, acidity and a fresh tomato flavour to the rice.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the rice and crumbs brown.
Cheese
Melts into the mixture and adds savoury flavour and browning.

The step that matters

Browning the rice in butter. Rice must be drained and dried before it hits the butter, since surface moisture steams it instead of letting it brown. Stirring it in the hot fat gives browned, nutty flavour that carries into the finished dish.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, butter, tomato, pepper, cheese):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, butter, tomato, pepper, cheese. 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.

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