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Milk Porridge

A simple milk porridge made with milk, flour, salt, and optional raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Milk Porridge

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the flour gradually with ¼ cup cold milk.

  2. Stir the mixture into 1 cup hot milk.

  3. If using raisins, cut them into quarters.

  4. If using raisins, cook them with the porridge.

  5. Cook over boiling water for 1 hour.

  6. Add salt just before serving.

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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

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

Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth porridge as its starch swells when heated.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a creamy porridge.

The step that matters

Mix the flour gradually with the cold milk. Flour added to hot liquid or dumped in at once clumps, because the outer starch gels before the inside wets. Blending it into cold milk first keeps it smooth when the hot milk is stirred in.

“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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