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Indian-meal Gruel

A gruel made by boiling water with Indian meal, optionally flavored with cream or thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,481 recipes. Both carry acetaldehyde, which smells pungent, ethereal. The science ↓

Indian-meal Gruel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Blend 2 tablespoons of Indian meal with a little cold water.

  2. Boil 1 quart of well-salted water.

  3. Stir in the meal and cook for a few minutes.

Simmer

  1. Set aside to boil gently for 4 hours, stirring occasionally.

  2. Do not cover the pot.

Finish and serve

  1. Alternatively, blend 1 teaspoon of flour with cold water.

  2. Stir the flour mixture into the boiling gruel.

  3. Boil for 3 minutes while stirring constantly.

  4. Serve with a little cream added.

  5. Serve.

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. Cream + flourtop 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

Indian meal
Cornmeal that thickens the water into a gruel as its starch swells during cooking.
Flour
Optional thickener that adds body to the gruel when stirred into boiling liquid.
Cream
Optional addition that adds richness and a smoother mouthfeel to the served gruel.

The step that matters

Stirring the meal into boiling water. Adding meal to liquid that is not yet simmering or stirring too little can clump it into lumps, because starch granules swell unevenly and stick together before they can disperse.

“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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