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Oatmeal Porridge

A simple hot cereal made from oatmeal simmered in water, served with optional sugar, treacle, or milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Oatmeal Porridge

Ingredients

Directions

Make the porridge

  1. Boil the water with a pinch of coarse sea salt.

  2. Stir in the oatmeal while the water is boiling.

  3. Once thickened, reduce heat and simmer for 20 to 30 minutes.

  4. For a lump-free version, mix oatmeal with cold water in a bowl until smooth, then transfer to a saucepan and boil for 30 minutes.

  5. Alternatively, pour boiling water over oatmeal and let it sit overnight, then boil until desired consistency is reached.

Serve

  1. Serve with sugar, treacle, or milk as desired.

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. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
Swells and thickens in the liquid, giving the porridge its body and texture.
Water
Hydrates the oats so their starch gelatinises and the porridge softens as it cooks.

The step that matters

Stirring the oatmeal into boiling water. Adding oats to water that is not yet boiling, or stirring poorly, lets them clump and form lumps before the starch disperses. Stirring as the oats go in spreads them evenly so the porridge cooks smooth.

“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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