Skip to main content
Main

Oatmeal Gruel

A simple oatmeal gruel cooked with water, salt, and served with cream and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Oatmeal Gruel

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Oatmeal Gruel

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gruel

  1. Add salt to the boiling water.

  2. Stir in the oatmeal and cook for 2.5 hours in a double boiler.

  3. Remove from heat and strain.

Serve

  1. For serving, mix ½ cup of the gruel with ½ cup of thin cream, 2 tablespoons of boiling water, and sugar to taste.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Oatmeal
Thickens the water into a soft, porridge-like gruel as its starch gelatinizes during long cooking.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the served gruel.

The step that matters

Long, gentle cooking in a double boiler. Oatmeal starch needs sustained, moderate heat to fully swell and soften. A double boiler keeps the temperature gentle so the gruel thickens evenly without scorching or boiling over 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes