Skip to main content
Main

Sauted Cornmeal Mush

Sautéed slices of cornmeal mush coated in flour and fried until browned, served with syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and syrup are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,540 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Sauted Cornmeal Mush

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Smooth leftover cornmeal mush into a dish and let it cool.

  2. Once cold, cut into slices ½ inch thick.

  3. Dip each slice into flour.

Cook and serve

  1. Melt 1½ teaspoons of dripping in a frying pan until smoking hot.

  2. Brown the floured slices on each side.

  3. Drain if necessary and serve on a hot plate with syrup.

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 + syruptop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,540 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Leftover cornmeal mush
Forms the main body of the dish once cooled, cut, and fried.
Flour
Coats the slices so they brown evenly and develop a crisp surface.
Dripping
Conducts heat to the slices and adds fat that browns the coating and adds flavour.

The step that matters

Heating the dripping until smoking hot before adding the slices. Hot fat sears the floured surface quickly, forming a crust before the mush can absorb grease and turn soggy. Cooler fat lets the slices soak up oil and brown unevenly.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes