Skip to main content
Main

Cornmeal Mush

A simple cornmeal mush cooked with water, milk, and salt, served hot with sugar and cream or cold fried slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cornmeal Mush

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mush

  1. Mix salt with cornmeal.

  2. Sprinkle cornmeal over boiling water in a double boiler, stirring vigorously until smooth.

  3. Add milk and cook for 3 hours, replenishing boiling water as needed.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with sugar and cream or milk.

  2. For cold mush, cut into thin slices and fry in a little butter or dripping 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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 its starch swells and sets while cooking.
Milk
Adds richness and softness, making the mush smoother and more tender than water alone.
Butter or dripping
Fat for frying cold slices, helping them brown and crisp on the outside.

The step that matters

Stirring the cornmeal into the boiling water. Adding cornmeal to boiling water while stirring vigorously keeps the grains separated, so they hydrate evenly and the mush cooks smooth rather than lumpy.

“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.

More cornmeal mush recipes

Fried 14 See all 94 →

You might also like

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