Flour Paste
Ingredients
Directions
Make the paste
Mix 1 pint of flour with 1 pint of cold water, pouring the water in slowly.
Work the mixture with the back of a spoon until perfectly smooth.
Cook
Stir the mixture into 1 pint of boiling water over the heat.
Keep stirring until it begins to boil.
Remove from heat.
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
What each ingredient does
- Flour
- Supplies starch, which swells and thickens the liquid when heated.
- Cold water
- Lets the flour disperse evenly so it forms a smooth mixture without lumps.
- Boiling water
- Heats the starch so it swells and thickens into a paste.
The step that matters
Stir the mixture into the boiling water. Flour starch clumps when it meets hot liquid unevenly. Stirring continuously as it goes in spreads the starch through the water, so the paste thickens smoothly instead of forming 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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