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Gelatine and Arrow Root for Babies

A gelatin and arrowroot mixture made with water, milk, sugar, and salt, suitable for babies.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Gelatine and Arrow Root for Babies

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gelatin base

  1. Soak the gelatin in ½ cup of cold water for 10 minutes.

  2. Add 1 pint of boiling water and boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Dissolve the arrowroot in cold water and stir it into the gelatin mixture.

Finish the custard

  1. Add 1 pint of milk and bring just to a boil.

  2. Stir in 2 small teaspoons of sugar and a pinch of salt.

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. 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a soft, smooth body as it cools.
Arrow root
Thickens the liquid so it becomes a smooth, pourable porridge-like texture.
Milk
Adds richness and a creamy, mild flavour to the mixture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, making the mixture more palatable for babies.

The step that matters

Stir the arrowroot in smoothly. Arrowroot dissolved in cold water must be stirred into hot liquid so it disperses evenly; added as lumps or without enough stirring, it clumps instead of thickening smoothly.

“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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