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Peptonised Milk-Gruel

A thick milk gruel made with farinaceous gruel, cold milk, pancreatic liquor, and bicarbonate of soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Peptonised Milk-Gruel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare a thick gruel from any farinaceous article.

  2. While the gruel is still boiling hot, mix it with an equal quantity of cold milk.

Add and keep warm

  1. Add 2-3 teaspoons of liquor pancreaticus and 10 grains of bicarbonate of soda to the mixture.

  2. Keep the mixture warm in a covered jug.

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

Gruel
Provides starch as the base that the added enzymes break down.
Cold milk
Adds moisture and dairy protein, and cools the hot gruel to a drinkable temperature.
Liquor pancreaticus
Pancreatic enzymes that break down starch and protein in the mixture.
Bicarbonate of soda
Raises the mixture's alkalinity, which helps the enzymes work.

The step that matters

Keep the mixture warm in a covered jug. Pancreatic enzymes work best at body-like warm temperatures and lose activity when they get too hot or cold. Covering the jug keeps heat in and the mixture from drying out or cooling too quickly.

“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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