Corn-meal Mush or Hasty Pudding
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil in a clean pot or stew-pan.
Add 1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt and remove any scum from the surface.
Make the pudding
With one hand, take a handful of corn-meal and with the other, stir the boiling water.
Gradually sprinkle in the corn-meal 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 or puffs up.
Serve
Pour into a deep basin and serve hot or cold with milk, butter, syrup, sugar, or with 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 corn-meal
- Forms the thick body of the pudding as its starch swells and sets in the boiling water.
- Water
- Cooks the cornmeal, hydrating its starch so the mixture thickens into a soft pudding.
The step that matters
Sprinkling in the corn-meal gradually. Adding cornmeal all at once while stirring can form lumps that stay dry inside. Sprinkling it slowly into boiling water, with constant stirring, lets each grain hydrate evenly and the starch thicken into a smooth mass.
“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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