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Oatmeal Porridge

A simple hot oatmeal porridge made with water, salt or sugar, and optional milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Oatmeal Porridge

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the oatmeal with cold water until uniform.

  2. Pour the mixture into a saucepan with boiling water.

Cook

  1. Boil and stir for 10 minutes.

  2. Add salt or sugar to taste.

  3. For a thicker porridge, continue boiling for 30 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve in a soup plate with cold milk poured over it.

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. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk 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

Oatmeal
Its starch thickens the water as it cooks, giving the porridge its body.

The step that matters

Mixing the oatmeal with cold water first. Dry oatmeal dropped into hot water can form lumps as its outer starch gelatinises at once. Mixing it smooth in cold water first lets the grains disperse evenly before they meet the boiling water.

“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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