Name: Riz a LA Strasbourg
Ingredients: 4 ounces freshly boiled rice; 1 jar Strasbourg paste (only the pate, not the fat); butter for greasing; grated yolk of 1 hard-boiled egg

Why it works: Rice and butter match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and 9,587 recipes mention both. Both carry gamma-undecalactone, which smells peach, sweet. The science ↓

The recipe

Oven, in the book's wordsA very hot oven

Ingredients

Contains: egg, milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

4 ounces freshly boiled rice
1 jar Strasbourg paste (only the pate, not the fat)
butter for greasing
grated yolk of 1 hard-boiled egg

Directions

Prepare

Mix the rice with the Strasbourg paste using a fork until well combined.
Grease a baking dish with butter.
Transfer the mixture into the greased dish.

Bake and serve

Bake in a very hot oven at 400°F (200°C) for 10 minutes.
Turn out onto a hot serving dish and garnish with grated yolk of hard-boiled egg.
Serve immediately.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Rice + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together9,587 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).
Butter + eggtop 8% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together118,511 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Rice + eggtop 15% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together8,090 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Freshly boiled rice: Forms the bulk of the dish and gives it a soft, starchy body.
Strasbourg paste: Supplies the rich, savoury flavour and binds the rice together.
Hard-boiled egg yolk: Adds a crumbly, mellow garnish that contrasts with the soft rice.

“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.