Thickened Milk
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Boil 1 pint of milk in an inner boiler.
Add ½ teaspoon of coarse sea salt.
Mix 1 heaping tablespoon of finely sifted Indian meal with enough cold milk to wet it smoothly.
Cook
Stir the mixture into the boiling milk.
Boil and stir for 15 minutes.
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
What each ingredient does
- Milk
- Forms the liquid base that the Indian meal thickens into a soft, spoonable mixture.
- Indian meal
- Its starch swells as it heats in the milk, thickening the liquid and giving it body.
The step that matters
Stirring the Indian meal into the boiling milk. Cornmeal starch clumps into lumps if it hits hot liquid dry or unevenly. Wetting it smoothly with cold milk first lets the grains disperse, and constant stirring keeps them separate so they thicken evenly as the starch swells.
“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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