Name: A Cheap and Nutritious Dinner
Ingredients: 1 lb rice; ½ lb bacon; 2 onions; salt

Why it works: Rice and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,433 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

A Cheap and Nutritious Dinner

Ingredients

1 lb rice
½ lb bacon
2 onions
salt

Directions

Prepare

Boil the rice in salted water until soft.
Fry the bacon and sliced onions together.
Mix the bacon and onions with the moist rice.

Steam and serve

Transfer the mixture to a greased deep basin.
Cover the basin with a cloth.
Place the basin in a large saucepan of boiling water.
Boil for 1 hour.

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 + oniontop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,433 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Rice: Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs flavour from the bacon and onions.
Bacon: Adds fat and savoury flavour that carries through the rice as it cooks.
Onions: Add sweetness and aroma as they soften and brown in the bacon fat.

“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.