Name: Boiled Rice with Marmite
Ingredients: 14 tablespoons Carolina or Japanese rice; 1 teaspoon MARMITE; 1 pint water; Salt to taste; Butter (optional)

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 ↓

Boiled Rice with Marmite

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rice

Wash the rice thoroughly.
In a saucepan, combine the rice with 1 pint of water and cook gently for 1 hour.
After an hour, add boiling water mixed with Marmite.

Season and serve

Season with salt and add a bit of butter if desired.
Serve warm.

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 + 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: Its starch absorbs water and softens as it cooks, giving the dish its body and texture.
Marmite: Adds a salty, savoury, umami flavour that seasons the rice throughout.

“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.