Skip to main content
Main

Oatmeal Porridge

A simple hot oatmeal dish cooked with water and optional milk, sweetened or salted to taste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 and serve

  1. Boil and stir for 10 minutes.

  2. For a thicker porridge, continue boiling for up to 30 minutes.

  3. Flavor with salt or sugar as preferred.

  4. Serve with milk poured over the porridge.

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
Forms the body of the porridge as its starch swells and thickens in boiling water.
Boiling water
Hydrates the oats and provides the liquid that gelatinises their starch into a porridge.

The step that matters

Adding the oatmeal mixture to boiling water. Oats clump easily if dumped in dry or added too slowly. Pre-mixing them with cold water spreads the starch evenly, so the porridge cooks smooth rather than lumpy when it meets 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.

More oatmeal porridge recipes

Scottish 4Cheese 3Scotch 3 See all 277 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes