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Wheatmeal Porridge

A simple porridge made by cooking wheatmeal in boiling water, sweetened with sugar and served with milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Wheatmeal Porridge

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Sprinkle the wheatmeal into the boiling water, stirring continuously until the mixture thickens.

  2. Cover the pot and cook gently for 1 hour.

  3. Serve in a soup plate with sugar and milk.

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. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Wheatmeal
Forms the body of the porridge as its starch thickens in the boiling water.
Boiling water
Hydrates the wheatmeal so its starch gelatinises and thickens the porridge.

The step that matters

Sprinkle the wheatmeal into the boiling water while stirring continuously. Adding the meal slowly while stirring keeps it dispersed, so lumps do not form and the starch thickens evenly as it hydrates.

“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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