Why it works: Rice and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,645 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓
Plain Rice Pudding
Ingredients
Directions
Cook the rice
Bring 2 cups of water to a boil in a kettle.
Add 1 cup of rice and reduce heat to simmer.
Cook for about 1 hour, stirring occasionally to prevent burning.
Serve
Once the rice has absorbed the liquid, transfer it to a dish.
Serve with fresh butter, melted butter sauce, or sugar.
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.
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Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together9,645 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Rice
- Starch that absorbs the water and swells into the soft, tender body of the pudding.
- Water
- Liquid that the rice absorbs as it cooks, softening the grains until they are tender.
The step that matters
Stirring during the simmer. Rice settles and sticks to the bottom of the pan as the liquid cooks off, and it can scorch there. Stirring occasionally keeps the grains moving and the heat even, which prevents burning.
“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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