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Rice with Tomato

Rice with Tomato is a simple dish of boiled rice mixed with sautéed onion, butter, pepper, salt, tomato pulp, and served 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 the onion

  1. Chop the onion.

  2. Fry the onion in butter until light brown.

Combine and serve

  1. Mix the fried onion with the boiled rice.

  2. Add pepper, salt, and tomato pulp and stir well.

  3. 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

Onion
Softens and sweetens when fried, building a savoury aroma for the rice.
Butter
Carries flavour and gives the onion a light golden browning.
Boiled rice
Forms the bulk of the dish and soaks up the butter and tomato flavour.
Tomato pulp
Adds moisture, acidity and colour to the rice.

The step that matters

Frying the onion until light brown. The onion's natural sugars caramelise gently as it browns, giving sweet, savoury depth. Browning past light brown turns bitter, so the onion should be watched closely.

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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