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Rice-flour Soup

A soup made by adding rice flour to broth and seasoning with mace, cayenne pepper, salt, curry powder, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Rice-flour Soup

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Rice-flour Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Mix the rice flour with a little cold broth.

  2. Pour the mixture into boiling broth or gravy-soup.

  3. Add mace, cayenne pepper, and salt if needed.

  4. Boil for 10 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. For added flavor, stir in curry powder and lemon juice before serving.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

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

  4. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Rice + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Fine rice flour
Thickens the broth as its starch swells during boiling, giving the soup body.
Broth or gravy-soup
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavor and dissolves the thickening starch.
Curry powder
Adds aromatic spice flavor to the soup when stirred in at the end.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the soup.

The step that matters

Mix the rice flour with cold broth first. Rice flour clumps when added dry or to hot liquid, because its outer starch gelatinizes quickly. Blending it smooth in cold liquid first lets it disperse evenly before the soup boils and thickens.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, flour, mace, pepper):

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Mangofits less well
  4. Raisinfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, flour, mace, 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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