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Indian Meal Gruel

A gruel made by blending Indian meal, flour, salt, and cold water, then cooking in boiling water and finishing with milk or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Indian Meal Gruel

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Blend Indian meal, flour, salt, and cold water to make a smooth paste.

  2. Stir the paste into boiling water.

  3. Boil slowly for 1½ hours.

  4. Dilute with milk or cream, and strain before serving.

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

Indian meal
Its starch thickens the liquid into a porridge-like gruel as it simmers.
Flour
Adds more starch to thicken the gruel and give it a smooth body.

The step that matters

Stir the paste into boiling water. Starch clumps if the cold paste is dropped in without stirring. Stirring disperses the grains so they swell and thicken evenly as the mixture heats.

“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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