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Valencian Rice

A tomato and rice dish cooked with chicken, vegetables, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Valencian Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the rice

  1. In a hot skillet, add lard and chopped tomatoes.

  2. Stir in the rice and cook until golden brown and each grain is separate.

  3. Cover the rice and tomatoes with chicken stock.

  4. Add parsley, green peas, diced carrots, diced celery, and the chicken pieces.

  5. Cook thoroughly without stirring, shaking occasionally.

Bake and serve

  1. Transfer to a baking dish, embedding the chicken in the rice.

  2. Top with a piece of pepper and slices of fried bananas.

  3. Garnish with slices of carrots and red peppers.

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. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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 absorbs the stock as it cooks, setting its texture.
Tomatoes
Add moisture and acidity that flavour the rice and give it colour.
Lard
Fat that coats the rice grains, helping them toast and stay separate.
Chicken
Provides savoury meat flavour that is absorbed into the rice as it cooks.
Chicken stock
Liquid that the rice absorbs, carrying chicken flavour through the dish.

The step that matters

Cook thoroughly without stirring, shaking occasionally. Stirring releases starch from the rice and makes it gummy, while gentle shaking keeps grains separate and lets the liquid absorb evenly so the rice cooks through without sticking to the pan.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, rice, chicken, parsley, carrot, celery, pepper):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Black-eyed peafits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, rice, chicken, parsley, carrot, celery, pepper. 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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