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Breakfast

Cream of Wheat

A hot breakfast porridge made by boiling water, adding cream of wheat, and cooking slowly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and wheat work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 681 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Cream of Wheat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Select a small porcelain or granite pail.

  2. Put 4 cups of water in the pail and bring to a boil.

  3. Add coarse sea salt to the boiling water.

Cook

  1. Stir in 1 cup of cream of wheat.

  2. Stir occasionally as it thickens.

  3. After 3-4 minutes, place the pail in a large cooker kettle with a wire tray below it.

  4. Surround the pail with hot water.

  5. Clamp the cover of the cooker kettle.

  6. Let it cook in the cooker overnight for a hot breakfast.

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. Cream + wheattop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together681 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream of wheat
Forms the thick, porridge-like body of the cereal as its starch swells in the hot water.
Water
Hydrates the cream of wheat so its starch can swell and thicken the cereal.

The step that matters

Stirring as it thickens. Cream of wheat can settle and scorch on the bottom of the pail as it thickens, so occasional stirring keeps the texture even and prevents sticking.

“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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