Corn Meal Mush or Hasty Pudding
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the water
Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil in a clean pot.
Add 1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt.
Remove any scum from the surface.
Make the mush
With your left hand, take a handful of corn meal.
Use a pudding stick in your right hand to stir the boiling water.
Gradually sprinkle in the corn meal while stirring until the mixture is thick enough to stir easily.
Continue stirring for a while longer.
Reduce the heat to gentle.
Cook for about 30 minutes until it bubbles or puffs up.
Serve
Pour into a deep basin.
Serve hot or cold with milk, butter, syrup, sugar, or with meat and gravy.
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
- Corn meal
- Forms the thick body of the mush as its starch swells and sets in the boiling water.
- Water
- Hydrates the corn meal so its starch can gelatinize and thicken the mixture.
The step that matters
Sprinkling in the corn meal while stirring. Adding meal too fast into boiling water can clump into lumps, because the outer grains hydrate and seal before the inside wets. Steady stirring while sprinkling keeps the grains separated so the starch thickens evenly.
“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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