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Corn Meal Mush or Hasty Pudding

A thickened cornmeal porridge cooked by adding meal to boiling water and stirring until it thickens.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By F. L. Gillette and Hugo Ziemann · From a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg) · 4 ingredients
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Corn Meal Mush or Hasty Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Put two quarts of water into a clean dinner pot or stewpan, cover it, and bring it to a rolling boil over the fire.

  2. Add a tablespoonful of salt and skim off the light scum from the surface.

Make the mush

  1. Stir in sweet, fresh yellow or white cornmeal.

  2. Hold a handful of cornmeal in the left hand and a pudding stick in the right hand.

  3. Using the stick, stir the water and gradually add the cornmeal.

  4. When one handful of cornmeal is exhausted, refill the pot with more cornmeal.

  5. Continue stirring and adding cornmeal until the mixture is as thick as you can stir easily, or until the stick will stand in it.

  6. Stir for a while longer and keep the fire gentle.

  7. When the mixture is sufficiently cooked, about half an hour, it will bubble or puff up.

Serve

  1. Turn the cooked mush into a deep basin.

  2. Serve hot or cold with milk, butter and syrup or sugar, or with meat and gravy.

By F. L. Gillette and Hugo Ziemann. Recipe from a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg).

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. See the original page.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Cornmeal (in the method)
Forms the thick body of the mush as its starch swells and sets when cooked.
Water
Hydrates the cornmeal so its starch can gelatinize into a smooth, thick porridge.

The step that matters

Adding the cornmeal gradually while stirring. Cornmeal dropped in all at once clumps into lumps that stay dry inside. Steady stirring while adding it keeps the grains separated so they hydrate evenly and the starch thickens into a smooth mush.

“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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