Name: Curried Rice
Ingredients: 1 pound rice; 1 tablespoon fresh butter; 1 tablespoon curry paste

Why it works: Rice and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,645 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Curried Rice

Ingredients

1 pound rice
1 tablespoon fresh butter
1 tablespoon curry paste

Directions

Prepare the rice

Boil the rice according to your preferred method.

Combine and serve

In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.
Add the boiled rice and curry paste to the saucepan.
Stir lightly to combine and heat through.
Serve hot.

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.

Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,645 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: Forms the bulk of the dish and soaks up the butter and curry flavor.
Butter: Adds fat for richness and carries the curry flavor across the grains.
Curry paste: Provides the spice, aroma and color that define the dish.

“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.