Skip to main content
Main

Infants' Milk Porridge

A simple infant porridge made by boiling flour in water, draining, then cooking in milk with salt and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Infants' Milk Porridge

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flour

  1. Tie the flour in a cloth tightly.

  2. Drop the cloth into boiling water and boil for 1 hour or more.

  3. Remove from water, hang to drain and cool.

  4. Once cool, remove the cloth and peel off the damp coating.

Make the porridge

  1. Grate the flour into boiling milk with a pinch of salt and sugar.

  2. Stir well and serve.

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. Sugar + milktop 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

Flour
Thickens the porridge as its starch swells and sets in the hot milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and gives the porridge a creamy body.
Sugar
Adds a mild sweetness.

The step that matters

Stir the grated flour into boiling milk. Starch granules swell when they meet hot liquid and can clump if added unevenly. Stirring well while adding the grated flour disperses it so the porridge thickens smoothly without lumps.

“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