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Oatmeal Day Diet

A diet consisting of oatmeal prepared with water, butter, egg whites, salt, and pepper, served as gruel, mush, or fried mush.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Oatmeal Day Diet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the oatmeal in water for 2 hours.

  2. Cook the oatmeal until nearly done.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the butter and egg whites.

  2. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  3. Serve as gruel, mush, or fried mush.

  4. Divide into 7 equal parts.

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. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  3. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

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

Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 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

Oatmeal
Forms the main body of the dish as its starch thickens into a soft mush when cooked.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, more pleasant mouthfeel.
Egg whites
Set when heated, adding structure and helping hold the mush together.

“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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