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Fried Mush

A fried cake made from boiled water, milk, cornmeal, and salt, cooked in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Fried Mush

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cornmeal mixture

  1. In a pot, combine boiled water, milk, corn meal, and salt.

  2. Boil the mixture for 30 minutes, then let it cool.

Shape and fry

  1. Shape the cooled mixture into cakes.

  2. Fry the cakes in boiling lard until golden brown.

  3. Serve with fried chicken.

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 + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn meal
Forms the body of the cakes, thickening into a firm mass as it cooks and cools.
Milk
Adds richness and helps browning on the fried surface.
Boiled water
Hydrates the corn meal so it swells and cooks into a workable mixture.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before shaping. Cooked cornmeal is soft and sticky while hot. Cooling lets the starch set so the cakes hold their shape and do not break apart in the hot lard.

“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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