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Drink

Milk or Pudding Diet

A diet using milk or pudding with optional rice, sago, arrowroot, butter, and beef tea.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and tea work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 197 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Milk or Pudding Diet

Ingredients

Directions

  1. If using bread, soak it in 2 pints of milk until soft.

  2. For a pudding, boil 1 pint of milk with rice, sago, or arrowroot until thick.

  3. Add 1 oz of butter to the mixture for flavor.

  4. Serve with beef tea if desired.

  5. Prepare 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 + teatop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together197 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

  5. Rice + arrowroottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together200 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Soaks up milk and softens into a moist, easy-to-eat base.
Milk
Provides the liquid that softens bread or thickens into a pudding.
Rice
Thickens the boiled milk as its starch swells, giving a pudding body.
Butter
Adds richness and fat for a smoother, more pleasant mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Boiling the milk with thickener until thick. Milk can scorch or boil over on the base of the pan if left unattended. Starches such as rice, sago, or arrowroot need to be fully heated to thicken properly, so stir steadily and keep the heat controlled.

Swap the arrowroot

The recipe marks arrowroot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, rice, butter, beef, tea):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

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

“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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