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Corn-Meal

A cornmeal mush cooked with flour, sugar or molasses, baking soda, and salt, served with butter, sugar, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Corn-Meal

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mush

  1. Scald the cornmeal in boiling water.

  2. Add fine flour, sugar or molasses, baking soda, and salt to the scalded cornmeal.

  3. Make a batter and boil for 1 hour, stirring often, or cook in a tin pan set in boiling water.

  4. Serve as mush with butter, sugar, and milk for supper.

Use the leftovers

  1. The next morning, thin the leftover mush with hot water, add eggs, and bake as muffins or griddle cakes.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 (in the method)
Forms the bulk of the porridge and gives it its body and grainy texture.
Eggs
Bind the thinned mush and help the muffins or griddle cakes hold together.
Baking soda
Reacts to lighten the batter so the leftover mush rises when baked.
Sugar or molasses
Adds sweetness and a deeper flavour to the mush.

The step that matters

Boiling the batter for 1 hour. Cornmeal starch must be fully cooked and swollen through long stirring over heat; undercooked cornmeal tastes raw and has a gritty, pasty texture. Stirring often keeps it from scorching on the bottom of the pot.

“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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