Name: Porridge or Gruel
Ingredients: 2 tablespoons ground almonds; small piece of German yeast (size of two peas); lukewarm water; saccharin (optional)

Why it works: Almond and peas work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 132 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Porridge or Gruel

Ingredients

2 tablespoons ground almonds
small piece of German yeast (size of two peas)
lukewarm water
saccharin (optional)

Directions

Prepare

Dissolve the yeast in a little lukewarm water and mix it with the ground almonds.

Rest and serve

Allow the mixture to stand in a warm place for 30 minutes or longer.
Adjust the consistency with water to achieve a custard or rice pudding texture.
Serve with stewed cranberries or other fruit if 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.

Almond + peastop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together132 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Ground almonds: Provide the bulk and nutty flavour of the porridge.
German yeast: Ferments during the warm rest, producing gas and a slightly tangy flavour.

“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.