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Cracked Wheat

A porridge made from cracked wheat, raisins, and water, cooked slowly and served with fruit sauce or crackers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and raisin work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 163 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Cracked Wheat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the wheat

  1. Wash the wheat and remove any imperfect grains.

  2. Crack or grind the wheat coarsely using a hand mill or sharp millstones.

Cook

  1. In a kettle, combine the cracked wheat, raisins, and cold water.

  2. Cook over medium heat, stirring frequently until scalded, then less often for 3 to 6 hours.

  3. Pour the mixture into wet moulding dishes while boiling hot.

  4. Let it cool slightly before serving.

Serve

  1. Serve warm or cold with apple, peach, or berry sauce, and dry crackers.

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 + raisintop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together163 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cracked wheat
Forms the bulk of the porridge and thickens as it cooks and absorbs water.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the porridge.

The step that matters

Stirring during scalding. Stirring frequently at first keeps the wheat from settling and scorching on the bottom of the kettle while the mixture heats and thickens. Later, less frequent stirring is enough for the long, slow cook.

“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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