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Milli Porridge

A porridge made from millet and flour, boiled with water and milk, seasoned with salt and sweetened with sugar.

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 ↓

Milli Porridge

Ingredients

Directions

Make the porridge

  1. Mix Indian meal and white flour with cold water to form a paste.

  2. Add the paste to 2 cups of boiling water and boil for 20 minutes.

  3. Stir in 2 cups of milk and a pinch of salt, cooking for an additional 10 minutes while stirring often.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with sugar and milk stirred in.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Indian meal
Provides the thickening body and grainy texture of the porridge.
White flour
Helps thicken the porridge and keeps it smooth rather than lumpy.
Milk
Adds creaminess, softness and richer flavour to the porridge.

The step that matters

Make the paste smooth before adding the boiling water. Starch lumps form if dry meal or flour meets hot liquid without being mixed into cold water first. Starch granules swell and thicken evenly only when they are fully dispersed, so a well-mixed paste gives a smooth porridge.

“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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