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Oatmeal Porridge

A simple porridge made by boiling water, oatmeal, and salt, served with milk or cream and optional sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and sugar 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

Cook the porridge

  1. Boil 1 pint of water in a saucepan.

  2. Gradually stir in 1 ounce of oatmeal and ½ teaspoon of salt using a wooden spoon.

  3. Let the porridge boil for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking.

Serve

  1. Once done, pour it out and serve with milk or cream, adding sugar if 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. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and sugar 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
Oat starch swells and thickens the water as it cooks, forming the porridge's body.

The step that matters

Stirring during the 30-minute boil. Oat starch thickens as it cooks and settles toward the base of the pan, where it can scorch. Regular stirring keeps the porridge smooth and stops it sticking.

“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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