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A Cheap Rice and Meat Soup

A simple soup of rice, ox cheek, and spices simmered in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,137 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

A Cheap Rice and Meat Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a large pot, combine the rice, pepper, broth herbs, and water.

  2. Cover and simmer gently.

  3. Add the cinnamon and ox-cheek.

  4. Boil until the flavors are well combined.

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. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Pepper + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 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
Absorbs the liquid and softens, thickening the soup and giving it body.
Ox-cheek
Its connective tissue breaks down into gelatin during long cooking, making the meat tender and the broth richer.
Cinnamon
Adds warm, sweet aroma to the broth.

The step that matters

Cover and simmer gently. Ox-cheek is a tough, collagen-rich cut. Gentle simmering lets the collagen slowly convert to gelatin, which makes the meat tender. A hard boil tightens the muscle fibres and can leave the meat stringy, while the cover keeps the liquid from evaporating too fast.

Swap the cinnamon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, pepper):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Celeryfits about as well
  4. Cinnamonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, 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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