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Dessert

Oatmeal Hasty Pudding

A quick oatmeal pudding made by mixing flour, oatmeal, salt with cold milk, then adding to boiling milk and cooking until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk 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 ↓

Oatmeal Hasty Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the flour, oatmeal, and salt smoothly with the cold milk.

  2. Gradually stir this mixture into the boiling milk.

  3. Beat the mixture with a fork until smooth and free from lumps.

  4. Let it boil quickly for 4 to 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. Pour onto small plates and serve hot.

  2. Serve cream and sugar or treacle in a tureen.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Flour and milk 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

Oatmeal
Thickens the milk and gives the pudding its body and grainy texture.
Flour
Adds further thickening so the mixture sets into a smooth, spoonable pudding.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the oatmeal and flour swell into a thick pudding.

The step that matters

Stirring the cold milk mixture into the boiling milk. Flour and oatmeal clump when dropped into hot liquid because their outer starch gelatinises before the inside wets. Blending smoothly in cold milk first and adding it gradually lets the starch disperse evenly, then beating with a fork removes any remaining lumps.

“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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