Why it works: Rice and mace work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 932 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓
Rice Soup
Ingredients
Directions
Bring 2 quarts of white stock to a boil.
Add 4 oz. of rice to the boiling stock.
Cook the rice for 5 minutes.
Drain the rice in a sieve.
Add the drained rice back to the boiling stock.
Allow the soup to stew until the rice is tender, about 1 hour.
Season with salt, cayenne, and pounded mace to taste.
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.
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Rice + macetop 17% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together932 recipes
Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Rice
- Thickens the soup as its starch releases during simmering and softens into tender grains.
- White stock
- Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour and cooks the rice.
The step that matters
Parboiling and draining the rice. Cooking the rice briefly and draining it before returning it to the stock removes surface starch, keeping the soup from becoming gluey and cloudy while the rice finishes tender.
“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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