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Rice Soup

A soup made with mutton, water, vegetables, spices, and rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Rice Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil the mutton in water with onions, carrot, turnip, cloves, peppercorns, celery, cinnamon, and mace for 3 hours.

  2. Strain the broth and return it to the pot.

Finish the soup

  1. Add the rice and cook until it dissolves completely.

  2. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Neck of mutton
Collagen in the neck breaks down during long simmering, giving the broth body and rich flavor.
Small rice
Its starch releases as the grains break down, thickening the broth.
Onions
They soften and release sweetness and aroma into the broth as it simmers.

The step that matters

Cooking the rice until it dissolves. Rice starch thickens the broth as the grains break down. Cooking too long can turn the soup gluey or pasty, so check the texture as it thickens.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, onion, carrot, turnip, clove, celery, cinnamon):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, onion, carrot, turnip, clove, celery, cinnamon. 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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