Name: Chicken Soup
Ingredients: 1 large hen; 1 gallon water; 1 cup rice; pepper; coarse sea salt

Why it works: Rice and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,379 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Chicken Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

Break up the hen and place it in a kettle with the water.
Cook for 6 hours.
One hour before finishing, add the rice and boil with the stock.

Finish and serve

Remove from heat and cool.
Skim off the grease and strain the soup through a sieve, pressing the rice through as well.
Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

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.

Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,379 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

Hen: Gives the soup its main meat and rich, savory flavor as it simmers.
Rice: Adds body and thickness when pressed through the sieve into the broth.

“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.