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 11% of all ingredient pairs, and 50 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Rice + watercresstop 11% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together50 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Sauce + watercresstop 9% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together295 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Rice + saucetop 11% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned together2,196 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Egg + watercresstop 12% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together582 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).
Rice + eggtop 15% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together8,090 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.