Name: Consomme Au Riz
Ingredients: 1 ounce best rice; 3 pints consomme; Parmesan cheese (optional)

Why it works: Rice and parmesan cheese work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 879 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Consomme Au Riz

Ingredients

1 ounce best rice
3 pints consomme
Parmesan cheese (optional)

Directions

Wash and boil the rice in water for 10 minutes.
Drain the rice and boil it in the consommé until tender and separated.
Serve with Parmesan cheese if desired.

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 + parmesan cheesetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together879 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice: Provides the body of the dish; cooking it in consommé lets it absorb flavour while softening.
Consommé: Supplies the liquid and savoury flavour in which the rice cooks.

The step that matters

Drain the rice and boil it in the consommé until tender and separated. Rice that is boiled first in water and then cooked in consommé must be watched so the grains become tender without breaking down into mush. Boiling too hard or too long can release excess starch, making the broth cloudy and sticky, while grains that are separated stay distinct and pleasant to eat.

“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.