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Indian Meal Mush

A thickened water dish made with Indian meal, butter, salt, and optionally milk or cream and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Indian Meal Mush

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mush

  1. Bring 1 quart of water to a boil in a pot.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of fresh butter and salt to taste.

  3. When the water is boiling hard, sift in ¾ cup of Indian meal while stirring continuously.

  4. Alternatively, wet the meal with cold milk before adding it to the boiling water.

  5. Reduce heat and boil slowly on the back of the stove until thick.

  6. You can also boil the meal in milk instead of water.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with milk or cream and sugar.

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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Indian meal
Cornmeal swells and thickens in boiling liquid, setting the mush into a thick porridge.
Water
Hydrates the meal so its starch gelatinizes and the mush becomes thick.
Milk or cream
Adds richness and softness, and mellows the corn flavor.
Fresh butter
Adds fat for a smoother mouthfeel and rounder flavor.

The step that matters

Sifting the meal into boiling water while stirring. Adding meal slowly into vigorously boiling water while stirring keeps starch granules dispersed. Dumping it in at once can clump it into lumps that never fully hydrate.

“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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