Skip to main content
Dessert

Mush, or Hasty Pudding

A simple cornmeal pudding cooked in salted water and served with butter, syrup, milk or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 the hot water and mix it with the corn-meal.

  3. Once the water is boiling, pour the corn-meal mixture into the pot 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 thickens in the hot water.
Water
Cooks the corn-meal and provides the moisture that turns it into a soft pudding.

The step that matters

Stirring the corn-meal mixture into the boiling water. Adding the corn-meal slurry to water that is already boiling helps it thicken evenly, while stirring keeps the starch from clumping or settling and scorching on the bottom.

“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.

More cornmeal pudding recipes

Apple 11Eggless 9Indian 6Boiled 5Molasses 4 See all 145 →

You might also like

Corn CakeCorn Cake90 recipesCorn Starch CakeCorn Starch Cake89 recipesCorn CakesCorn Cakes22 recipesGreen Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding14 recipes