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Buttermilk Corn-meal Mush

A thick, savory cornmeal mush made with buttermilk and salt, served hot or cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and buttermilk work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 226 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Buttermilk Corn-meal Mush

Ingredients

Directions

Make the porridge

  1. Combine corn meal, buttermilk, and salt in a pot.

  2. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until thickened.

Serve

  1. Pour into cups to mold if desired.

  2. Serve hot or chill and serve cold with 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. Corn + buttermilktop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together226 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn meal
Its starch swells and gelatinizes as it heats, thickening the buttermilk into a porridge.
Buttermilk
Supplies the liquid that hydrates the cornmeal and adds a mild tang.

The step that matters

Stirring constantly while cooking. Cornmeal settles and sticks to the bottom of the pot as it heats, so it can scorch there. Constant stirring keeps the mixture moving, prevents lumps, and lets the starch thicken evenly.

“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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