Skip to main content
Main

To Make Groat Gruel

A porridge made from groats, water, mace, currants, and toasted bread.

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

Why it works: Mace and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,791 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

To Make Groat Gruel

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the groats

  1. Boil the groats in water until desired thickness is reached.

  2. Add the mace and remove from heat.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the washed currants.

  2. Serve in a china bowl with long pieces of toasted bread around the edge.

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. Mace + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,791 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Currant + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Mace + breadtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,005 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Groats
Form the main body, as their starch swells and thickens the porridge in water.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy, juicy bites to the plain grain.
Mace
Adds a warm, spiced aroma to the porridge.

The step that matters

Removing the porridge from heat at the right thickness. Porridge keeps thickening as it cools, because the starch in the groats continues to swell and set. Removing it from heat when it is slightly looser than the desired thickness helps avoid a stiff, gluey result.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (currant, bread):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits about as well
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against currant, bread. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes