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Rice-soup, with Pease

A simple rice soup flavored with onions, leeks, cloves, parsley, and green peas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,326 recipes. Both carry ethyl butyrate, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Rice-soup, with Pease

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  2. Add the chopped onion and leek; fry until golden.

  3. Add the rice and fry for 1 minute.

  4. Moisten with warm water and bring to a boil.

  5. Remove from heat and add cloves, salt, and parsley; boil gently.

  6. After 10 minutes, add the green peas.

  7. Once cooked, remove the parsley and cloves, and add a piece of butter.

Serve

  1. Pour into a tureen and serve.

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. Onion + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,326 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  2. Leek + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together759 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Leek + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  4. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Leek + peastop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together249 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice
Starch that thickens the soup as it cooks and gives it body.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the soup.
Onion
Sweetness and savoury depth when fried until golden.
Leek
Mild onion flavour that builds the base of the soup.
Green peas
Adds sweetness, colour and a tender texture.

The step that matters

Frying the rice. Frying the rice briefly in butter coats the grains in fat, which helps them stay separate and adds a toasty flavour. Keep it short so the rice does not brown or stick to the pan.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, leek, rice, clove, parsley):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, leek, rice, clove, parsley. 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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