Skip to main content
Main

Corn Mush

A thickened cornmeal porridge made by boiling water and milk with cornmeal and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Corn Mush

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Bring 1 quart of water to a boil in a pot.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix 1 pint of cold milk, 1 pint of cornmeal, and 1 teaspoon of salt.

Cook

  1. Once the water is boiling, gradually pour in the cornmeal mixture while stirring continuously.

  2. Let it boil for 1 hour, stirring often.

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

What each ingredient does

Cornmeal
Forms the thick, porridge-like body of the mush as its starch swells in boiling water.
Milk
Adds richness and softness, and its proteins and sugars give the mush a mild, creamy flavor.

The step that matters

Pour the cornmeal mixture gradually while stirring. Adding cornmeal slowly into boiling water and stirring constantly keeps the starch dispersed, which prevents clumps and a lumpy, uneven texture.

“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 corn mush recipes

You might also like