Corn-meal Mush or Hasty Pudding
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil in a large pot.
Add 1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt and remove any scum from the surface.
Make the pudding
With one hand, take a handful of cornmeal and stir the water with a pudding stick in the other hand.
Gradually add the cornmeal, refilling your hand as needed, until the mixture is thick enough that the stick can stand in it.
Continue stirring for a while longer over gentle heat.
Cook for about 30 minutes until it bubbles or 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
- Sweet fresh corn-meal
- Forms the thick body of the pudding as its starch thickens in the boiling water.
- Water
- Cooks the cornmeal, hydrating its starch so the mixture thickens into a pudding.
The step that matters
Adding the cornmeal gradually. Dropping cornmeal in all at once forms lumps as the outer grains swell before the inside hydrates. Adding it by handfuls while stirring keeps the mixture 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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