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Drink

Arrow Root

A sweet milk beverage thickened with arrowroot, cinnamon, and sugar, optionally flavored with wine, lemon juice, or brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Arrow Root

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, mix the arrowroot with a small amount of cold milk to form a smooth paste.

  2. In a saucepan, bring the remaining milk to a boil.

Thicken and serve

  1. Stir the arrowroot paste into the boiling milk.

  2. Cook for 1 minute until thickened.

  3. Add cinnamon and sugar to taste.

  4. If desired, stir in wine or lemon juice before serving.

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Arrowroot + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together166 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Wine + brandytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,427 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Starch that thickens the milk into a smooth, glossy pudding when heated.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and provides creaminess and body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavour of the milk.

The step that matters

Mixing the arrowroot into a cold paste first. Starch added directly to hot liquid clumps before it can disperse. Dissolving it in cold milk first lets the granules separate evenly, so the mixture thickens smoothly when it reaches the boil.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (arrowroot, milk, cinnamon, sugar, wine, brandy):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against arrowroot, milk, cinnamon, sugar, wine, brandy. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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