Name: Turkey Bone Soup
Ingredients: 2 quarts water; turkey bones; ½ cup rice; salt to taste; pepper to taste

Why it works: Rice and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,379 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Turkey Bone Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

Place the turkey bones in 2 quarts of water.
Boil for 2 hours.
Remove the bones from the pot.

Finish the soup

Add ½ cup of rice to the broth.
Season with salt and pepper.
Boil for an additional 30 minutes.

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.

Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,379 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Turkey + peppertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,636 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Turkey + ricetop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together135 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Turkey bones: Give the broth its meaty flavor and body during the long boil.
Rice: Adds starch that softens and slightly thickens the broth as it simmers.

“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.