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Thickened Milk

A thickened milk made by boiling flour in water, cooling, then adding to milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Thickened Milk

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flour

  1. Tie the flour in a strong cotton cloth and boil it in water for 4 hours.

  2. Remove the flour from the cloth and let it cool.

Make the thickened milk

  1. Boil the milk over water.

  2. Thicken the milk with 1 tablespoon of the cooled flour, mixed smooth with a little cold milk.

  3. Season with salt and sugar if desired.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Cooked and cooled, it thickens the milk as its starch swells and sets the liquid.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the cooked flour thickens into a smooth mixture.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour smooth with cold milk. Starch clumps when it meets hot liquid without being dispersed first. Stirring the flour into a little cold milk separates the particles, so they can thicken the hot milk evenly without lumps.

“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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