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Drink

A Flour Caudle

A simple hot drink made with flour, water, milk, and sugar.

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 ↓

A Flour Caudle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the flour with the water until smooth.

  2. In a saucepan, heat the milk with the sugar until it boils.

Cook

  1. Pour the flour mixture into the boiling milk and stir well.

  2. Cook over low heat for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

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).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Fine flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells and sets during cooking.
New milk
Forms the creamy liquid base and adds richness and body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the milk base.

The step that matters

Pour the flour mixture into the boiling milk and stir well. Stirring disperses the flour's starch evenly as it goes in, so it thickens smoothly. If it is poured in without stirring, the starch clumps into lumps that do not dissolve easily.

“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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