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White Rice Soup

A soup made with white rice, stock, salt, cayenne pepper, mace, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,379 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

White Rice Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Add the rice to boiling water and cook for 5 minutes.

  2. Drain the rice in a sieve and add it to the boiling stock.

Make the soup

  1. Let the soup stew until the rice is tender.

  2. Season the soup with salt, cayenne, and pounded mace.

  3. Stir in the cream and bring the soup to a boil.

  4. Serve the soup quickly.

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 + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Rice + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together932 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Mace + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,009 recipes
  5. Rice + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Softens as it simmers, thickening the soup and giving it body.
White boiling stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the whole soup.
Very rich cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the soup a smooth, mellow texture.
Pounded mace
Contributes a warm, aromatic spice flavour.

The step that matters

Stir in the cream and bring the soup to a boil. Cream can curdle or separate when it is boiled hard for long. Once it is added, the soup should be heated just to the boil and served promptly, as the record instructs.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, pepper, cream. 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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