Name: Steamed Rice
Ingredients: 1 cup rice; ½ teaspoon salt; 2 cups boiling water or 3 cups milk

Why it works: Rice and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Steamed Rice

Ingredients

1 cup rice
½ teaspoon salt
2 cups boiling water or 3 cups milk

Directions

Prepare and steam

Pick over and wash the rice in 3 or 4 waters.
Combine the rice, milk (or water), and salt in the upper part of a double boiler.
Steam for 30 minutes or until soft.

Serve

Serve as a dessert with boiled custard or hard sauce.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,374 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: Its starch softens and swells as it absorbs liquid during steaming, giving the grains their tender texture.
Milk: Adds richness and a mild sweetness, and supplies the liquid the rice absorbs as it cooks.

“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.