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Arrowroot Milk Porridge

A sweet porridge made with arrowroot, milk, water, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and arrowroot work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 817 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyraldehyde, which smells malty, chocolate. The science ↓

Arrowroot Milk Porridge

Ingredients

Directions

Make the porridge

  1. In a bowl, mix the arrowroot with a little cold water to form a paste.

  2. In a farina kettle, add the sugar to the milk and the salt to the boiling water.

  3. Pour the boiling water into the kettle and add the arrowroot paste.

  4. Boil while stirring constantly until the mixture is clear.

  5. Add the milk and cook for 10 minutes, stirring often.

Serve

  1. Serve warm, adding hot milk if the porridge is thicker than 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. Milk + arrowroottop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

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

  3. Arrowroot + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, clear porridge as it heats with the water.
Milk
Adds creaminess and richness, softening the porridge's texture.
White sugar
Adds sweetness to the porridge.

The step that matters

Stirring while the mixture boils. Arrowroot starch can clump and scorch if it sits unstirred in hot liquid. Constant stirring keeps the starch dispersed so it thickens evenly and turns clear.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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