Name: Rice Soup, with a Chicken
Ingredients: ½ pound rice; 1-2 chickens; 4 cups stock

Why it works: Rice and chicken are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,769 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Rice Soup, with a Chicken

Ingredients

½ pound rice
1-2 chickens
4 cups stock

Directions

Rinse the rice and place it in a stewpan with the chickens and stock.
Bring to a boil over low heat and cook until the chickens are tender and the rice is soft.
Add more stock to fill the tureen as needed.
Skim off any fat from the surface of the soup.

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 + chickentop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,769 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

Rice: Softens as it cooks, thickening the broth and giving the soup body.
Chickens: Release flavour and gelatin into the stock as they simmer until tender.
Stock: Forms the cooking liquid that carries the flavour of the whole soup.

“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.