Name: Modern Cookery
Ingredients: 6 oz rice; 1 pint green gooseberries; sugar to taste

Why it works: Rice and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,744 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

6 oz rice
1 pint green gooseberries
sugar to taste

Directions

Prepare

Rinse the rice under cold water.
In a pot, combine the rice and 1 pint of water.

Cook

Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes until rice is tender.
In a separate pot, cook the green gooseberries until soft.

Serve

Serve the rice with the gooseberries and plenty of sugar on top.

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 + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,744 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 bulk of the dish and becomes tender and starchy as it simmers in water.
Green gooseberries: Provide tart acidity and fruit flavour that contrasts with the mild rice.
Sugar: Sweetens the tart gooseberries and balances their acidity.

“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.