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Baby Food

A wheat gruel for infants, made with wheat, water, salt, sweetened milk, sugar, and optional almond flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Baby Food

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the wheat

  1. Soak the wheat in ½ cup of water until absorbed.

  2. Boil or steam the soaked wheat in 1 quart of water until well done.

  3. Mash the wheat through a colander and return it to the fire with the gruel.

Finish the porridge

  1. Add 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 pint of sweetened milk (with 3 tablespoons of sugar).

  2. Heat slowly until it reaches a simmering point.

  3. Pass the mixture through a sieve and a butter cloth.

  4. For added nutrition, blend in the flour of 10 finely grated blanched almonds when adding the milk.

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. Wheat + milktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Wheat + almondtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together264 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Milk + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,800 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Wheat
Its starch swells and thickens with cooking, giving the porridge its body.
Milk
Adds creaminess, richness and a smoother mouthfeel to the porridge.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the porridge.

The step that matters

Heating the milk slowly. Starch-thickened mixtures with milk can scorch on the bottom or form lumps if heated too fast. Heating gently and stirring keeps the texture smooth and the milk from burning.

Swap the almond

The recipe marks almond as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (wheat, milk, sugar):

  1. Walnutfits about as well
  2. Peanutfits about as well
  3. Milletfits about as well
  4. Almondthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wheat, milk, sugar. 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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