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To Boil Rice, and Make Syrian Pillau

A boiled rice dish flavored with butter, optional saffron, and optional hard boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and saffron work together. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 629 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

To Boil Rice, and Make Syrian Pillau

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Clean the rice thoroughly. Wash and strain the rice.

Cook the rice

  1. Bring 9 cups of salted water to a boil.

  2. Add the rice to the boiling water and boil for a few minutes.

  3. Reduce heat and let the rice sit until the water is absorbed without stirring.

  4. Remove the cover and pour melted butter over the rice.

  5. Gently stir the rice three times with a spoon and cover again.

  6. Let it sit for a few minutes before serving on a dish without stirring.

Serve

  1. Optionally, color the water with saffron or serve with hard boiled eggs.

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 + saffrontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together629 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + saffrontop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together581 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Rice + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,350 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

Rice
Forms the bulk of the dish, with its starch absorbing water to set into a fluffy grain structure.
Melted butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the grains for flavour and a softer mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Let the rice sit without stirring. Stirring during the absorption and resting phases breaks the grains and releases starch, making the rice gummy. Letting it rest covered lets steam finish cooking the grains evenly and firm them up.

Swap the saffron

The recipe marks saffron as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, butter, egg):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Saffronthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, butter, egg. 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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