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Drink

Buttermilk Feeding

A sweetened buttermilk beverage made by fermenting milk, adding flour and sugar, and heating to a boil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and wheat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Buttermilk Feeding

Ingredients

Directions

Sour the milk

  1. Pour 1 quart of sweet milk into a sterile pitcher and cover with a sterile towel to keep out dust.

  2. Let it stand at room temperature (65-70°F) for 24 hours.

  3. Skim off the cream.

  4. Churn the sour milk in a small glass churn for 15 minutes.

  5. Place the churned buttermilk on ice.

Make the feeding

  1. In a double boiler, combine 1 quart of buttermilk with 3 teaspoons of wheat flour and 15 teaspoons of granulated sugar.

  2. Cook while stirring constantly until it reaches boiling point to prevent curdling.

  3. Chill on ice.

  4. Stir before warming when 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. Milk + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and flour 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

Sweet milk
Sours into buttermilk, which is the base of the feeding.
Wheat flour
Thickens the mixture as it cooks, giving it body.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and food for the cultures in the feeding.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour mixture while stirring constantly. Flour thickens only as its starch heats, and constant stirring spreads heat evenly so lumps and curdling are avoided. Stopping or letting it sit can scorch or split the mixture.

“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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