Skip to main content
Dessert

Peptonized Milk Gruel

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rice and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Peptonized Milk Gruel

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gruel

  1. Prepare a thick gruel from the farinaceous material.

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

Digest and finish

  1. Add 2-3 teaspoons of liquor pancreaticus and ½ teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda to the mixture.

  2. Keep the mixture warm in a covered jug for 2 hours.

  3. Boil for a few minutes and then strain.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Farinaceous material (oatmeal, rice)
Forms the thick starchy base that gives the gruel its body.
Cold milk
Adds moisture and softness and cools the hot gruel to a workable temperature.
Liquor pancreaticus
Enzyme-containing liquid that breaks down starches and proteins during the warm holding period.
Bicarbonate of soda
Raises the pH, making the mixture less acidic and helping the enzymes work.

The step that matters

Mixing the hot gruel with cold milk. Adding the milk while the gruel is still boiling hot is meant to cool it to a lukewarm level, so the enzymes are not destroyed by excessive heat. Adding the enzyme too hot would deactivate it before the holding period.

“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.

You might also like

Rice CakeRice Cake120 recipesRice CreamRice Cream43 recipesRice JellyRice Jelly42 recipesRice PuddingRice Pudding22 recipes