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Dessert

Graham Mush

A dessert made with graham flour, dates, sugar, and cream, cooked in boiling water.

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

Graham Mush

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mousse

  1. Bring 3 pints of water to a boil.

  2. Sift in 1 pint of graham flour while stirring constantly to avoid lumps.

  3. Add 1 teaspoon of salt and let it boil for 20 minutes.

  4. Just before it's done, stir in the chopped dates.

  5. Pour into a dish that has been rinsed with cold water to prevent sticking.

Serve

  1. Serve with sugar and cream.

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 + datestop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Dates + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together985 recipes

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

  5. 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

Graham flour
Thickens the boiling water into a porridge-like mass that sets as it cools.
Dates
Add sweetness and soft texture, and are stirred in near the end so they stay in pieces.

The step that matters

Sifting the graham flour in while stirring. Adding flour to boiling water all at once forms lumps that are hard to smooth out. Sifting it in slowly while stirring constantly lets the starch disperse and gelatinize evenly, giving a smooth mousse.

Swap the dates

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, cream):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Datesthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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