Name: Baked Mutton and Rice
Ingredients: 1 pound rice; 3 pounds breast of mutton; 1 tablespoon salt

Why it works: Rice and mutton are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,019 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Baked Mutton and Rice

Ingredients

1 pound rice
3 pounds breast of mutton
1 tablespoon salt

Directions

Prepare

Boil the rice until soft and drain it well.
Place the rice in a deep dish and mix in the salt.

Bake

Lay the breast of mutton on top of the rice.
Bake in the oven until the mutton is cooked through.

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.

Rice + muttontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,019 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Rice: Forms the bulk of the dish and soaks up fat and juices from the mutton as it bakes.
Breast of mutton: Supplies the meat and fat that cook down into the rice, giving it flavour and moisture.

“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.