Skip to main content
Breakfast

Milk Porridge

A simple milk and water porridge thickened with flour, served hot over a toasted cracker.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and flour 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 ↓

Milk Porridge

Ingredients

Directions

Make the porridge

  1. In a pot, combine milk and water and bring to a boil.

  2. In a small bowl, mix flour with cold water until smooth.

  3. Add the flour mixture and salt to the boiling liquid.

  4. Boil together until the mixture thickens.

Serve

  1. Place the toasted cracker in a bowl and pour the porridge over it.

  2. Serve hot.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Milk
Provides the main liquid and creamy body of the porridge.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when heated, giving the porridge body.
Toasted cracker
Adds a crisp, toasted flavor and texture as the base the porridge is poured over.

The step that matters

Add the flour mixture to the boiling liquid. Flour mixed in cold water and added to hot liquid disperses evenly; stirring while it boils lets the starch swell and thicken without clumps.

“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.

More milk porridge recipes

French 5Arrowroot 4 See all 119 →

You might also like

Rice GruelRice Gruel28 recipesPeptoned Milk GruelPeptoned Milk Gruel9 recipes