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Rice with Tomato

A simple rice dish flavored with tomato, onion, butter, pepper, and salt, topped with grated cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,065 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Rice with Tomato

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the onion and fry it in butter until light brown.

  2. Mix the fried onion with the boiled rice.

  3. Add pepper, salt, and tomato pulp to the rice mixture.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with grated cheese.

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 + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Fat that fries the onion, adding richness and browning flavour.
Onion
Softens and browns in butter, adding sweetness and savoury depth to the rice.
Tomato pulp
Adds acidity, moisture and tomato flavour that colours the rice.
Boiled rice
Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs the butter and tomato flavours.

The step that matters

Frying the onion until light brown. Frying onion in butter until it turns golden develops sweet, savoury flavour through browning. Stopping too early leaves it raw-tasting, while over-browning makes it bitter.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, rice, pepper, tomato, cheese. 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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