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Mexican Rice

A simple rice dish cooked with tomatoes, fat, and paprika.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,065 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mexican Rice

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a pan, brown the rice in the fat.

  2. Add the boiling water, tomatoes, salt, and paprika.

  3. Cook slowly until the rice is tender.

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.

  1. Rice + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 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
Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs the liquid as it cooks to become tender.
Fat
Carries heat to the rice and helps it brown lightly before the liquid is added.
Tomatoes
Supply moisture, acidity and flavour that colour and season the rice as it simmers.
Paprika
Adds mild colour and a sweet, earthy aroma to the finished rice.

The step that matters

Cook slowly until the rice is tender. Low, gentle heat lets the rice absorb the liquid evenly and soften without scorching on the bottom or drying out before the grains are cooked through.

“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.

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