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Boiled Rice for Curries

A boiled rice dish seasoned with salt and lemon juice, served as a vegetable accompaniment to curries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,366 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Boiled Rice for Curries

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rice thoroughly.

Cook the rice

  1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and add salt and lemon juice.

  2. Add the rice and boil for 15 to 20 minutes until the grains break easily between your thumb and finger.

  3. Drain the rice in a wire sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Rinse with a little cold water and let it dry thoroughly, keeping the grains separate.

  2. Serve as a vegetable.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Patna rice
Forms the bulk of the dish, with its starch setting into separate, fluffy grains as it cooks.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the cooking water so the rice itself is flavoured as it boils.
Lemon juice
Adds a little acidity that brightens the flavour of the rice.

The step that matters

Boil until the grains break easily. Rice that is undercooked stays hard, while overcooked rice turns mushy and sticky. Testing grains between thumb and finger shows when the starch has gelatinised through the grain. Draining and drying afterwards keeps the cooked grains separate.

“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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