Name: Chicken Broth
Ingredients: ¾ lb chicken; 2 tablespoons rice; 3 pints cold water; 1½ teaspoons salt; Few grains pepper

Why it works: Chicken and rice 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 ↓

Chicken Broth

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

Clean the chicken; remove skin and fat, disjoint, and wipe with a wet cloth.

Make the broth

Put the chicken in a kettle, add cold water, and heat slowly to boiling point.
Skim the surface and cook until the meat is tender.
Add salt and pepper when the chicken is half cooked.

Strain and finish

Strain the broth and remove the fat.
Reheat to boiling point, add rice, and cook until the rice is soft.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Chicken + ricetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,769 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).
Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,379 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Chicken + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together19,958 recipes

Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken: Provides the meat and flavor that give the broth its body and taste.
Rice: Thickens the broth slightly as its starch softens during cooking.
Cold water: Serves as the cooking liquid that extracts flavor from the chicken.

“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.