Name: Quaker Oats Mush
Ingredients: ½ cup Quaker Rolled Oats; 1½ cups boiling water; ¼ teaspoon salt; sugar (to serve); cream (to serve)

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Quaker Oats Mush

Ingredients

Directions

Add salt to boiling water.
Stir in oats and cook for 30 minutes in a double boiler.
Serve with sugar and cream.

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.

Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Oats + sugartop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,548 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Oats + creamtop 28% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together634 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Rolled oats: Provide the starch and fiber that thicken the water into a porridge.
Boiling water: Hydrates the oats and gelatinizes their starch as they cook.
Salt: Brings out the flavor of the oats.

“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.