Skip to main content
Dessert

Oat Meal Jelly

A gelatinous breakfast cereal made by soaking oatmeal overnight, boiling the water, and setting the mixture with cream and sugar.

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

Why it works: Cream and sugar 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 ↓

Oat Meal Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak 1 cup oatmeal in 2½ cups water overnight.

  2. In the morning, strain off the water through a sieve.

  3. Boil the strained water for 15 minutes.

Set and serve

  1. Turn the mixture into molds and set in a cool place.

  2. After 20 minutes, it will jelly and be warm enough to eat as a breakfast cereal with cream and sugar.

  3. In summer, set on ice and serve cold with hulled strawberries or sliced peaches, sugar, and cream.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + peachtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

  3. Cream + peachtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together721 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Oatmeal
Provides the starch that thickens the strained water into a jelly as it cools.
Water
Extracts the oatmeal's starch and forms the body of the jelly.
Cream
Adds richness and fat that softens the jelly's flavour when served.

The step that matters

Boiling the strained water for 15 minutes. Boiling gelatinizes the oat starch so the liquid can set into a jelly as it cools. Too little boiling may leave it too thin to set.

Swap the peach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, 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.

You might also like

Peach Ice CreamPeach Ice Cream64 recipesPeach FrittersPeach Fritters55 recipesPeach MeringuePeach Meringue40 recipesPeach IcePeach Ice16 recipes