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Spanish Rice

A simple rice dish cooked with lard, tomatoes, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,065 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Spanish Rice

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the lard in a pan.

  2. Add the rice and cook slowly until browned.

  3. Stir in the tomatoes, salt, and pepper.

  4. Cook slowly for one hour.

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. Rice + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 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

Lard
Fat that carries flavor and helps the rice brown in the pan.
Rice
Forms the body of the dish and absorbs the tomato liquid as it cooks.
Tomatoes
Provide moisture, acidity, and color that build the sauce as they simmer.

The step that matters

Browning the rice in the lard. Frying the rice until golden lets its starches caramelize and the Maillard reaction add toasty, nutty flavor. Rice added to the tomatoes while still pale tastes flatter and less rich.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits about as well
  3. Tomatothe original
  4. Spinachfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, pepper. 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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