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Flour and Milk

A thickened milk made by boiling flour in water and adding it to milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Flour and Milk

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the flour

  1. Fill a small basin with flour and tie it tightly in a cloth.

  2. Immerse the cloth in a saucepan of water and boil slowly for 10 to 12 hours.

  3. After boiling, remove the cloth and let the flour dry.

Make the milk

  1. Add 1 tablespoon of the grated cooked flour to 1 pint of milk and boil.

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).

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
Its starch is cooked into a dry powder that later thickens the milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid base, and its proteins and fats give the finished mixture body and richness.

The step that matters

Boiling the floured cloth slowly and keeping it submerged. Long, steady boiling cooks the starch in the flour so it can later swell and thicken liquid. If the cloth rises above the water or the boil is uneven, the flour cooks unevenly and thickens poorly.

“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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