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Frumenty

Frumenty is a grain dish made by boiling creed grain with water or milk and thickening with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour 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 ↓

Frumenty

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Add the creed grain to a pan with water or milk.

  2. Place the pan on the fire and stir constantly with a wooden spoon.

  3. Break any lumps to prevent burning.

  4. When near boiling, mix a little flour with cold milk until smooth, then add to the mixture.

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour 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

Creed grain
Forms the main body of the dish; its starch swells and thickens as it cooks.
Water or milk
Cooks the grain until soft and carries its starch into a thick, spoonable mixture.
Flour
Adds extra starch to thicken the mixture further.

The step that matters

Stir constantly. Grain and starch sink to the base of the pan and scorch before the liquid thickens. Constant stirring spreads the heat evenly, and breaking lumps early stops them hardening into clumps that stirring cannot reach.

“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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