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Indian Meal Gruel

A simple gruel made by boiling water, adding flour and Indian meal, and seasoning with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Indian Meal Gruel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a pot, bring 1 quart of water to a boil.

  2. Mix 1 tablespoon of flour and 2 tablespoons of Indian meal with a little cold water.

Cook and serve

  1. Stir the mixture into the boiling water.

  2. Boil for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  3. Season with salt and strain the gruel.

  4. Serve with sugar and cream if desired.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + creamtop 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
Thickens the water into a gruel by swelling and gelatinising as it cooks.
Flour
Adds body and helps thicken the gruel so it stays smooth.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour and meal with cold water before adding. Starch clumps when it meets hot liquid directly. Making a smooth slurry with cold water first lets the particles disperse evenly, so the gruel thickens without lumps.

“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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