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Mush, or Hasty Pudding

A quick cornmeal pudding made by boiling water with salt, adding cornmeal, and cooking until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Mush, or Hasty Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a pot, bring the water and salt to a hot temperature, but do not let it boil.

  2. Take out ½ pint of hot water and mix it with the corn-meal.

  3. Once the water is boiling, pour the corn-meal mixture in and stir until it thickens.

  4. Let it boil slowly, uncovered, for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with butter and syrup, or when cooled, with milk or 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.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn-meal
Forms the thick body of the pudding as its starch swells and sets in the hot water.
Water
Hydrates the corn-meal and carries the heat that cooks and thickens the starch.

The step that matters

Stirring the corn-meal into the hot water. Adding cornmeal to water that is not yet boiling, or stirring too little, can leave lumps and uneven thickening. Pre-mixing the cornmeal with a portion of hot water helps it disperse evenly before it goes into the pot.

“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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