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Boiled Rice with Sweet Sauce

A simple boiled rice dish served with a sweet sauce made from flour, water, and sugar or syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and raspberry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,109 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Boiled Rice with Sweet Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

  1. Wash the rice and add it to boiling water with a pinch of salt.

  2. Boil for about 20 minutes until a grain crumbles when rubbed between your fingers.

  3. Drain the rice in a colander and pour 1 cup of cold water over it.

  4. Return the rice to the saucepan and let it stand for a few minutes to dry.

Make the sweet sauce

  1. For the sweet sauce, mix 1 tablespoon of flour with 4 tablespoons of water until smooth.

  2. Stir this mixture into ½ pint of boiling water and add sugar or syrup to taste.

  3. Cook over heat until the sauce boils, then optionally add 1 ounce of butter and 1 tablespoon of lemon juice.

  4. For flavor, you can add nutmeg, cinnamon, or 1 tablespoon of raspberry jam or fruit syrup.

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. Lemon + raspberrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Rice + raspberrytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together201 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Its starch cooks into soft grains that form the bulk of the dish.
Flour
Starch thickens the water into a smooth, pourable sauce as it heats.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the sauce, giving it a smoother mouthfeel.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour paste into boiling water. Flour mixed with water first and then added to boiling liquid disperses evenly, so the starch thickens smoothly. Adding dry flour directly to hot liquid would clump into lumps that are hard to remove.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, flour, sugar, butter, raspberry):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, flour, sugar, butter, raspberry. 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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