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Dried Flour for Teething Children

A remedy made by boiling flour in milk to soothe teething children.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Dried Flour for Teething Children

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flour

  1. Tie up as much flour as a napkin will hold.

  2. Boil in plenty of cold milk for at least four hours in an earthen bowl.

  3. Remove the solid ball from the napkin and scrape off the thick yellow rind.

Make the milk mixture

  1. Grate 1 tablespoon of the flour, wet it with a little cold water, and stir in ½ cup of boiling milk.

  2. Add a pinch of salt and boil for about five minutes.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Its starch thickens the milk as it heats, giving the mixture a soft, smooth body.
Cold milk
Provides the liquid that the flour cooks in and gives the final mixture its creamy moisture.
Boiling milk
Heats the wet flour quickly so its starch swells and thickens into a smooth mixture.

The step that matters

Wetting the grated flour before adding boiling milk. Flour starch clumps when it meets hot liquid without first being dispersed. Mixing the flour with a little cold water first lets the grains separate, so they thicken the milk evenly instead of forming lumps.

“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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