Skip to main content
Main

Fried Mush

A cornmeal mush made with cornmeal, flour, water, and salt, then fried and served with maple syrup.

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

Why it works: Flour and maple syrup are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,034 recipes. Both carry eugenol, which smells clove, spicy. The science ↓

Fried Mush

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Sift the cornmeal and flour together.

  2. Bring the salted water to a boil.

Cook the mush

  1. Stir in a handful of the cornmeal mixture and let it boil for a few minutes.

  2. Slowly stir in the remaining cornmeal mixture.

  3. Cover and simmer for about 15 minutes, stirring to prevent burning.

Set and fry

  1. Mold the mixture in a brick pan overnight.

  2. Turn out, slice, and fry until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with maple 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 + maple syruptop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,034 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Yellow cornmeal
Forms the thick body of the mush as its starch gelatinizes with heat.
All-purpose flour
Adds starch that helps the mixture hold its shape when molded and sliced.
Water
Hydrates the cornmeal so its starch can swell and thicken into a mush.

The step that matters

Stirring while the mush simmers. Cornmeal settles and scorches on the bottom of the pan as it thickens. Frequent stirring keeps heat even and prevents burning, which would give a bitter taste.

“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

Maple SauceMaple Sauce9 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes