Corn-meal Mush or Hasty Pudding
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil in a large pot or stew pan.
Add 1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt and remove any scum from the surface.
Make the mush
With one hand, take a handful of cornmeal and with the other, stir the boiling water.
Gradually sprinkle in the cornmeal while stirring until the mixture is thick enough to stir easily.
Continue stirring for a while longer and reduce the heat to gentle.
Cook for about 30 minutes until it bubbles and puffs up.
Serve
Pour into a deep basin and serve hot or cold with milk, butter, syrup, sugar, or alongside 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
- Yellow or white cornmeal
- Forms the thick body of the mush as its starch swells and sets while cooking.
- Water
- Hydrates the cornmeal so its starch can gelatinize and thicken into a spoonable mass.
The step that matters
Sprinkling in the cornmeal. Adding cornmeal too fast to boiling water can clump into lumps as the outer grains swell before the inside hydrates. Adding it gradually while stirring keeps the starch dispersed so the mush cooks smooth.
“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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