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Fried Mush

A fried mush made from boiled Indian meal, flour, and egg, served as a savory dish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and egg 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. Bring 2 quarts of water and 1 tablespoon of salt to a boil in a saucepan.

  2. Gradually stir in 2 pounds of Indian meal until thick enough to hold a pudding stick upright.

  3. If needed, mix the meal with cold water first, then pour it into the boiling water while stirring.

  4. Add 2 heaping tablespoons of flour to each pound of Indian meal to help the mush hold together when frying.

  5. Boil the mixture for 1 hour, stirring often to prevent burning.

  6. Pour the cooked mush into pans or dishes wet with cold water and let it cool.

Fry and serve

  1. Once cooled, slice the mush into ½ inch thick pieces.

  2. Beat 1 egg in a shallow dish, dip the slices in the egg, and fry in hot lard until 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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg 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 body of the mush and sets as it cools.
Flour
Adds starch that helps the sliced mush hold together during frying.
Egg
Coats the slices so they brown and form a crisp outer surface.

The step that matters

Stirring during the one-hour boil. Cornmeal thickens and sticks to the bottom of the pan quickly, so frequent stirring prevents scorching and keeps the mush smooth.

“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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