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Fried Mush

A fried mush made from Graham meal, salted, boiled, cooled, sliced, floured, and fried in lard and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fried Mush

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mush

  1. Boil salted water in a pot.

  2. Slowly sift in Graham meal, stirring briskly until thick.

  3. Remove from heat and pour into bread tins to cool.

Fry and serve

  1. Once cool, slice the mush.

  2. Dip each slice in flour.

  3. Fry in a mixture of lard and butter in a frying pan until both sides are browned.

  4. Serve hot.

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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Graham meal
Forms the thick mush base that sets as it cools, then slices and fries.
Flour
Dusting on each slice helps create a browned, crisp outer crust when fried.
Lard
Fat for frying that conducts heat well and browns the slices evenly.
Butter
Adds flavor and helps the slices brown in the frying fat.

The step that matters

Stirring the Graham meal into boiling water. Sifting slowly while stirring briskly keeps the meal from clumping into lumps and lets the starch thicken the mush evenly. Lumps would make the slices crumble when cut and fried.

“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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