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Indian Meal Gruel

A simple gruel made by cooking Indian meal in boiling water, seasoned with salt, and optionally sweetened with sugar and cream.

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. Wet the Indian meal with a little cold water.

  2. Pour the wet meal into the boiling water.

  3. Add the salt.

Cook and serve

  1. Let it simmer for two hours.

  2. Strain into a cup.

  3. Add 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).

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

What each ingredient does

Indian meal
Cornmeal that thickens the water as it cooks, giving the gruel its body.
Boiling water
Hydrates the meal and cooks the starch so the gruel thickens and softens.

The step that matters

Wetting the Indian meal before adding it to the boiling water. Cornmeal added dry to hot liquid clumps as its outer starch gelatinises instantly, leaving lumps. Mixing it with a little cold water first disperses the particles so they cook 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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