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Fried Mush

A fried cornmeal cake made from boiled cornmeal, egg, and flour, cooked in sweet lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fried Mush

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mush

  1. In a pot, bring 1½ cups of water to a boil and add ½ teaspoon of salt.

  2. Slowly stir in ½ cup of cornmeal and boil briskly until well‑cooked.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then add 1 egg and mix thoroughly with a wire potato masher or strong spoon.

  4. Add enough flour to form a thick batter for cakes.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat a spoonful of sweet lard in a frying pan.

  2. Fry the mush cakes in the hot lard until they are a rich brown on each side.

  3. Place the fried cakes on a hot platter and serve.

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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Cornmeal
Forms the main body of the cakes, setting into a firm mush when cooked.
Egg
Binds the cooled mush together so the cakes hold their shape.
Flour
Thickens the mixture into a batter that can be shaped into cakes.
Sweet lard
Fries the cakes, creating a crisp, browned surface.

The step that matters

Frying the cakes in hot lard until richly browned. The lard must be hot before the cakes go in, so the surface sears and browns quickly. Cold fat lets the cakes soak up grease and stick, and they may fall apart.

“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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