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Indian-meal Gruel

A simple gruel made by cooking Indian meal in salted water, optionally thickened with flour and served with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,481 recipes. Both carry acetaldehyde, which smells pungent, ethereal. The science ↓

Indian-meal Gruel

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gruel

  1. Blend 2 tablespoons of Indian meal with a little cold water.

  2. Bring 1 quart of well-salted water to a boil.

  3. Stir in the meal and cook for a few minutes.

  4. Reduce heat and let it boil gently for 4 hours, stirring occasionally. Do not cover the pot.

Serve and thicken

  1. Serve with a little cream added.

  2. For a thicker gruel, blend 1 teaspoon of flour with cold water, stir it into the boiling gruel, and boil for 3 minutes while stirring constantly.

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. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Indian meal
Cornmeal swells in boiling water and thickens the gruel into a porridge.
Water
Hydrates the meal and forms the liquid body of the gruel.
Flour
Optional thickener that adds body when stirred into the boiling gruel.

The step that matters

Stirring while the gruel boils. Cornmeal settles and can scorch on the bottom of the pot during long gentle boiling, so stirring keeps it smooth and evenly cooked. Starch granules swell and thicken as they cook, and lumps form if flour is added without thorough blending in cold water first.

“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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