Name: Rice
Ingredients: 1 cup of rice; 1 teaspoon of salt; 1 tablespoon of butter; 1 quart of boiling water

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 ↓

Rice

Ingredients

1 cup of rice
1 teaspoon of salt
1 tablespoon of butter
1 quart of boiling water

Directions

Combine rice, salt, butter, and boiling water in a pot.
Cook for 20 minutes.
Serve with cream and sugar.

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 as it cooks, swelling into tender grains that form the body of the dish.
Butter: Adds fat for richness and a smoother flavor to the cooked grains.

“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.