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Farmers' Rice

A thickened milk porridge made with whole-wheat flour, sugar, and optional egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Farmers' Rice

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rivelings

  1. In a bowl, combine whole-wheat flour, salt, and sugar.

  2. Slowly add cold milk to form dry rivelings, working with a spoon to avoid large lumps.

Cook

  1. In a graniteware pan, bring 2 quarts of milk to a boil.

  2. Once boiling, stir in the rivelings slowly.

  3. Boil gently for 15 minutes, stirring to prevent burning.

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. Wheat + milktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Whole-wheat flour
Forms the rivelings and gives the dish its body and nutty flavour.
Milk
Cooks with the flour to form a thickened, creamy porridge.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and a little flavour to the porridge.

The step that matters

Stirring the rivelings into boiling milk. Adding the rivelings slowly and stirring keeps them separate, so they do not clump together. Gentle boiling with regular stirring prevents the starch-rich milk from scorching on the bottom of the pan.

“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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