Name: Curried Rice
Ingredients: 1 ½ cups rice; 2 tablespoons conserve de tomates; ½ pint good curry sauce; 2 hard-boiled eggs, quartered; watercress salad

Why it works: Rice and watercress work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 59 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Curried Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the rice in the usual manner.
Pour the conserve de tomates and curry sauce over the rice.
Stir well and place beside the fire to dry a little.
Serve with quartered hard-boiled eggs and watercress salad.

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 + watercresstop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together59 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Sauce + watercresstop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together295 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Rice + saucetop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,396 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Egg + watercresstop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together638 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).
Rice + eggtop 28% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,350 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

Rice: Forms the bulk of the dish and soaks up the sauce.
Conserve de tomates: Adds tomato sweetness and acidity that balance the curry flavour.
Curry sauce: Supplies the spiced flavour and moisture that coats the rice.

“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.