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Dessert

Fried Indian Muffins

Fried Indian muffins are cornmeal batter fried in hot fat and served with melted maple sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fried Indian Muffins

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Combine Indian meal, boiling water, salt, and sugar in a bowl and mix thoroughly, then let the batter cool.

  2. Add eggs and flour to the mixture and beat well.

Fry and serve

  1. Dip a tablespoon in cold milk, fill it with batter, and drop it into hot fat.

  2. Fry for about 10 minutes until golden brown.

  3. Serve with hot melted maple 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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)
Forms the main body of the muffin, giving it its grainy texture.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness to the muffins.
Flour
Adds body to the batter and helps the muffins hold their shape.

The step that matters

Dip the spoon in cold milk before filling. Cold milk on the spoon keeps the sticky batter from clinging, so each portion releases cleanly into the hot fat and keeps its shape.

“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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