Skip to main content
Drink

Middle or Ordinary Diet

A diet plan including bread, porter, dressed meat, potatoes, rice pudding, mutton broth, vegetable soup, butter, porridge, gruel, and barley water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rice and barley 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 ↓

Middle or Ordinary Diet

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Serve 12 oz. of bread with ½ pint of porter.

  2. Alternate 4 oz. of dressed meat, roasted and boiled, with 8 oz. of potatoes.

  3. Prepare ½ lb. of rice pudding three times a week.

  4. On days with boiled meat, serve ½ pint of mutton broth.

  5. Occasionally serve 1 pint of strong vegetable soup with meat and rice pudding twice a week.

  6. Include 1 oz. of butter each day.

  7. Prepare porridge, gruel, and barley water as needed.

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. Rice + barleytop 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Bread + muttontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, meat, rice, mutton, butter, barley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

You might also like

Rice WaterRice Water82 recipesRice MilkRice Milk37 recipesBarley WaterBarley Water22 recipesGround Rice MilkGround Rice Milk7 recipes