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Milk Porridge

Milk Porridge made by boiling milk with raisins and thickening with flour paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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

Make the porridge

  1. Put the raisins into the milk and bring it to a boil.

  2. Mix the flour with a little cold water or milk to form a paste.

  3. Add the paste to the boiling milk and cook for 3 to 4 minutes.

Finish and vary

  1. For a variation, stir in the well-beaten egg white after removing from heat.

  2. You can also omit the raisins and flavor the porridge with salt, sugar, or nutmeg.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the porridge and gives it its creamy body.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a porridge when cooked in the boiling liquid.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture as they soften in the hot milk.

The step that matters

Add the flour paste to the boiling milk. Flour must be smoothed into cold liquid first so it does not clump. Adding it to boiling milk then cooking for a few minutes lets the starch swell and thicken the porridge evenly.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, raisin, flour, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits about as well
  4. Gingerfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, raisin, flour, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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