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Oatmeal and Water Porridge

A simple porridge made by boiling water and coarse Scotch oatmeal, seasoned with salt and optionally sweetened with treacle or brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Oatmeal and Water Porridge

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil 1 quart of water in a pot.

  2. Sprinkle 1 cup of coarse Scotch oatmeal into the boiling water while stirring with a wooden spoon.

  3. Continue stirring until the mixture thickens.

  4. Let it boil for a few minutes.

  5. Add ¼ teaspoon of salt.

  6. Serve in soup plates or a dish, and enjoy with treacle, brown sugar, butter, 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. 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

Coarse scotch oatmeal
Starch from the oats swells in boiling water and thickens the porridge into a creamy texture.

The step that matters

Sprinkle the oatmeal into the boiling water while stirring. Adding oats gradually while stirring keeps the grains separated so they hydrate evenly. Dumping them in at once can cause lumps and uneven thickening.

“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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