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Milk Porridge

A thickened milk or water porridge made by boiling flour, drying, and mixing with a paste of dried flour and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Milk Porridge

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the flour

  1. Tie the desired amount of flour in a muslin bag or towel and boil for 4 to 5 hours.

  2. Bake the boiled flour in an oven at 300°F (150°C) until dry.

Make the porridge

  1. Grate 2 tablespoons of the dried flour and mix it with cold water to form a paste.

  2. Add the paste to 1 pint of boiling milk or boiling water.

  3. Boil for 10 minutes.

  4. If using water, you can add condensed milk made with 1 part condensed milk to 4 parts water.

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 + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Dried flour
Thickens the liquid into a porridge as its starch gelatinises when boiled.
Milk
Provides the liquid base and adds richness and a creamy texture.

The step that matters

Adding the paste to boiling liquid. The paste must be stirred into already boiling liquid so the starch swells evenly; adding it to cold liquid can cause lumps.

“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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