Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Fried Corn Mush
Ingredients
Directions
Make the mush
Sprinkle cornmeal into boiling salted water and cook thoroughly.
Make the mush a day before serving and let it cool.
Bread and fry
Slice the cooled mush.
Dip each slice in beaten eggs, then coat with bread or cracker crumbs.
Fry the slices in boiling lard until golden brown.
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.
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Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together22,662 recipes
Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Cornmeal
- Forms the thick mush that sets when cooled, giving the slices their body.
- Eggs
- Bind the coating so the crumbs stick to each slice.
- Bread or cracker crumbs
- Form a crisp, browned outer crust when fried.
- Lard
- Conducts heat for frying and browns the crumb coating.
The step that matters
Cool the mush fully before slicing. Cornmeal mush thickens and sets as it cools. Slicing it warm would make the pieces soft and likely to break, so the mush needs to be firm before it is coated and fried.
“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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