Name: Chicken and Rice Soup
Ingredients: 2 spring chickens; 2 quarts clear rice soup (made with chicken broth or consomme); light seasoning

Why it works: Chicken and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,769 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Chicken and Rice Soup

Ingredients

2 spring chickens
2 quarts clear rice soup (made with chicken broth or consomme)
light seasoning

Directions

Prepare the chicken

Truss and boil the chickens.
Remove the skin and cut the chickens into small pieces.
Trim the pieces neatly and place them in a soup tureen.

Serve

Pour the clear rice soup over the chicken pieces.
Season lightly and serve.

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.

Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,769 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

Spring chickens: Provide the tender meat and the flavorful cooking liquid that the dish is built on.
Clear rice soup: Supplies the liquid base and body that carries the chicken pieces.

“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.