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Milk Porridgre

A hot milk porridge made with flour, milk, salt, optional sugar, nutmeg, butter, and raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Milk Porridgre

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the porridge

  1. Mix flour with ½ cup cold milk.

  2. Heat 1½ cups milk in a saucepan.

  3. Stir in the flour mixture, salt, and optional sugar and nutmeg.

  4. Stir constantly until boiling, then boil for 1 minute.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

  2. Optionally, add butter or flavor with boiled raisins.

  3. For a variation, stir in a stiffly beaten egg white after removing from heat.

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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Nutmeg + raisintop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 milk into a smooth, creamy porridge as it heats and boils.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into porridge.

The step that matters

Stir constantly until boiling. Flour settles and clumps on the hot pan bottom if left unstirred, and constant stirring keeps the starch dispersed so the porridge thickens smoothly.

Swap the raisin

The recipe marks raisin as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, milk, sugar, nutmeg, butter):

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, sugar, nutmeg, butter. 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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