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Fried Mush

A fried cornmeal and flour cake cooked in boiling water and then fried in pork fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and pork are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,187 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fried Mush

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mush

  1. Mix salt and flour with cornmeal in a bowl.

  2. Stir into boiling water and beat well.

  3. Boil gently for 2 hours.

Set and fry

  1. Pour into dishes dipped in hot water and let cool overnight.

  2. Cut into 1-inch thick slices in the morning.

  3. Fry slices in pork fat until brown.

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 + porktop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and pork barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,187 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

Cornmeal
Forms the thick body of the mush as it cooks with the water.
All-purpose flour
Adds starch that helps the mush hold its shape when cooled and sliced.
Pork fat
Conducts heat for frying the slices and browns their surface.

The step that matters

Pour into dishes dipped in hot water and let cool overnight. The mush must set fully before slicing. Cornmeal starch thickens and firms as it cools, so cutting too early can leave slices that crumble or smear.

“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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