Skip to main content
Main

Indian-meal Mush

A porridge made by cooking yellow Indian meal with boiling water, salt, then frying slices in butter or pork drippings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Indian-meal Mush

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mush

  1. Pour 1 pint of boiling water over 1 cup of yellow Indian meal and add 1 teaspoon of coarse sea salt, stirring constantly to prevent lumps.

  2. Tie the mixture in a wet cloth.

  3. Place a tea stand in the pot to prevent the cloth from sticking, then boil the wrapped mixture in a pot of salted boiling water for 2 to 3 hours.

  4. Once cooked, turn the mush onto a dish and let it cool.

Fry and serve

  1. Slice the cooled mush, dredge with flour or bread crumbs, and fry in hot salt-pork drippings or butter.

  2. Serve hot with butter and 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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + syruptop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,796 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Yellow indian meal
Cornmeal that thickens with boiling water into the mush that sets when cooled.
Boiling water
Hydrates the cornmeal so its starch swells and gelatinizes into a thick porridge.
Flour or bread crumbs
Coating that forms a crisp, browned surface when the slices are fried.
Salt-pork drippings or butter
Frying fat that browns the dredged slices and adds rich flavor.

The step that matters

Stirring the mixture while adding the water. Cornmeal clumps when hit by liquid, and lumps stay dry inside. Constant stirring disperses the meal so the starch hydrates evenly and the mush cooks smooth.

“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

Pork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes