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Simple Diet

A simple diet plan using bread, meat, potatoes, milk, barley water, and various puddings over several days.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Barley and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 568 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Simple Diet

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Alternate roasting and boiling the meat and potatoes for 4 days.

  2. Make soup with 4 oz. of beef and 1 pint of broth with barley.

  3. Serve 1 pint of milk with rice pudding for 4 days and batter pudding for 3 days.

  4. Prepare 1 pint of gruel to serve alternately with 1 pint of barley water.

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. Barley + ricetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together568 recipes

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

  2. Potato + barleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together165 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Potato + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together851 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Barley + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together458 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Meat
Roasting browns the surface, adding savoury flavour, while boiling keeps the meat tender.
Potatoes
Starch that softens when boiled and adds bulk to the meal.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness to the meal.
Barley
Starch that thickens the soup and adds body to the liquid.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, meat, milk, barley, beef, rice):

  1. Potatothe original
  2. Asparagusfits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Tomatofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, meat, milk, barley, beef, rice. 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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