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Fried Mush

A fried dough made from Indian meal, water, eggs, and flour, cooked in hot lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fried Mush

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mush

  1. Mix the Indian meal with cold water.

  2. Add boiling water and boil for about 20 minutes.

  3. Let the mixture cool completely.

Fry

  1. Stir in the beaten eggs and flour.

  2. Take spoonfuls of the mixture and fry in hot lard until golden brown.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 thick base that sets as it cools and fries to a crisp exterior.
Eggs
Bind the cooled mush so the fritters hold their shape when fried.
Flour
Adds body and helps the fritters brown evenly in the hot fat.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool completely. Cornmeal mush must be fully cooled and firm before the eggs and flour are stirred in and it is fried. If it is still warm and loose, the spoonfuls will spread and break apart in the hot lard instead of holding their 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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