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Boiled Rice

A simple boiled rice dish prepared by soaking, steaming, and serving with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Boiled Rice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the rice in cold water, rubbing it between your hands until it is white and free from loose starch.

  2. Soak the rice overnight in water.

Steam and serve

  1. In the morning, place the soaked rice in a steamer over a pot of cold water with plenty of salt.

  2. Steam the rice for about 45 minutes until the grains are soft.

  3. Pour the rice into a dish and add a lump of butter in the center before serving.

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 + 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
Provides the starch that becomes soft, fluffy grains when steamed.
Butter
Adds fat and richness that coats the warm grains and carries flavor.

The step that matters

Washing the rice until the water runs clearer. Rubbing the rice removes loose surface starch that would otherwise make the cooked grains sticky and clumped together.

“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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