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Chicken and Rice

A stew of chicken joints cooked with curry paste, curry powder, tomatoes, and rice in a broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Olive and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,539 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Chicken and Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Wipe the chicken joints dry and trim them neatly.

  2. Heat the olive oil in a stewpan until hot, testing with a piece of bread.

  3. Fry the chicken joints until golden brown, stirring and turning them.

  4. Sprinkle the chicken with salt.

Stew the rice

  1. Add chopped onions and red chillies and fry them together.

  2. Mix in the quartered tomatoes and washed rice.

  3. Pour in a small quantity of broth.

  4. Stew until the rice is cooked and the broth is absorbed.

  5. Sprinkle with chopped parsley.

  6. Serve in a deep dish without a cover.

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. Olive + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,539 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Olive + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Olive + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,994 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Tomato + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 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

Chicken
Its fat and connective tissue release flavour and juices into the dish as it cooks.
Olive oil
Carries heat evenly for browning the chicken and carries the curry flavours through the dish.
Rice
Absorbs the broth as it cooks, becoming tender and soaking up the seasoning.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and moisture that break down into the sauce, balancing the spices.
Curry paste
Concentrated spices and aromatics that give the dish its core curry flavour.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they fry, forming a flavour base for the stew.

The step that matters

Frying the chicken until golden brown. Browning builds deep flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale, steamed chicken tastes flat, and pieces crowded or wet from not being dried first will steam rather than brown.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, olive, tomato, rice, onion):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, olive, tomato, rice, onion. 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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