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Soup

A Flour Caudle

A simple flour-based soup made with water, flour, 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. In a bowl, mix the water and flour until smooth.

Make the caudle

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

  2. Once boiling, pour in the flour mixture and stir.

  3. Cook over low heat for 20 minutes, stirring continuously.

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

All-purpose flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, creamy caudle as its starch cooks.
Whole milk
Forms the creamy base of the caudle and adds richness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the milk base.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the boiling milk. Flour lumps form if it meets hot liquid unevenly or is not stirred. Mixing it smooth first and stirring continuously while it cooks keeps the caudle silky, because the starch in flour thickens as it heats.

“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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