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Creole Receipt for Boiling Rice

A simple boiled rice dish flavored with butter and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,645 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Creole Receipt for Boiling Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rice

  1. Wash the rice in three waters and dry it with a clean cloth after the last wash.

Boil and drain

  1. Bring a deep saucepan of water to a boil and sprinkle the rice into it.

  2. Boil uncovered for 20 minutes, then test several grains for tenderness.

  3. If not tender, boil for an additional 2-3 minutes.

  4. Remove from heat and drain the rice in a colander.

Dry and finish

  1. In a saucepan, combine the drained rice with butter and salt.

  2. Place the saucepan where it can receive heat without scorching, and do not cover.

  3. Occasionally turn the rice lightly from the bottom with a fork to break up lumps.

  4. After about 40 minutes, the rice should be dry and each grain separate.

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 + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 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

Rice
Provides the starch that becomes the body of the dish once cooked and dried.
Butter
Adds fat that coats the grains, adding richness and helping them stay separate.

The step that matters

Drying the drained rice over gentle heat. Once drained, the rice still holds surface moisture. Drying it slowly without a lid lets that moisture evaporate so the grains stay separate instead of clumping or scorching on the bottom of the pan.

“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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