Name: Milk Soup with Rice Spiape
Ingredients: ½ pound rice; 1 quart milk; ¼ pound sweet almonds; sugar to taste; 8 egg yolks

Why it works: Rice and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,456 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Milk Soup with Rice Spiape

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

Blanch the rice, then let it swell in milk.
Sweeten the rice with sugar.
Pound the sweet almonds and mix them with the rice.
Place the mixture into a mold and let it cool.

Make the sauce

Boil the milk with sugar.
Color the milk yellow with the egg yolks.

Serve

Turn the rice mixture out into a serving dish and pour the milk over it.
Serve hot or cold.

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 + almondtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,456 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,374 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Milk + almondtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,800 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together15,679 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together88,785 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rice: Forms the body of the dish and thickens as it swells in milk.
Milk: Cooks with the rice to create a soft, creamy texture and forms the sauce.
Sweet almonds: Add richness and fat, giving body and a nutty flavor to the rice.
Egg yolks: Enrich the milk, adding color, richness and a smooth texture.
Sugar: Adds sweetness that balances the milk and almonds.