Skip to main content
Main

Frumenty

Frumenty is a boiled grain porridge made with seed grain, water or milk, and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Prepare

  1. Add 1 pint of seed grain to a pan.

  2. Pour in 2 pints of water or milk.

Cook

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

  2. Break lumps to prevent burning.

  3. When near boiling, mix a little flour with cold milk or water and add it to the pan.

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
Its starch swells and softens during cooking, giving the porridge its body and bulk.
Water or milk
Provides the liquid that cooks the grain until it becomes soft and creamy.
Flour
Starch from the flour thickens the liquid further when added near boiling.

The step that matters

Stirring constantly. Grain and flour settle on the base of the pan and scorch quickly on direct heat. Constant stirring keeps particles moving, prevents burning, and helps starch disperse evenly so lumps do not form.

“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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes