Name: Boiled Rice {for Curry, Etc.}
Ingredients: 4 ounces Patna or Carolina rice; 3 pints boiling water; Salt; Lemon juice

Why it works: Rice and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,366 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Boiled Rice {for Curry, Etc.}

Ingredients

4 ounces Patna or Carolina rice
3 pints boiling water
Salt
Lemon juice

Directions

Prepare

Pick and wash the rice.

Cook

In a stew-pan, combine the rice with boiling water, slightly salted and flavored with lemon juice.
Cook rapidly for 15 to 20 minutes.
Pour off the water and drain the rice.

Finish

Rinse the rice in cold water, then drain again.
Place the rice in front of the fire or in the oven to dry and heat, stirring frequently to separate the grains.

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 + lemontop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,366 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: Provides the starch that forms the body of the dish as it cooks in boiling water.
Boiling water: Cooks the rice by gelatinizing its starch, softening the grains until tender.

The step that matters

Cook rapidly for 15 to 20 minutes. A rolling boil keeps the water moving and the grains separate, while slow simmering can make rice gummy or unevenly cooked.

“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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Boiled Rice {for Curry, Etc.}