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Corn-Meal

A boiled cornmeal mush served with butter, sugar, and milk, or baked into muffins or griddle cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Corn-Meal

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mush

  1. Scald the cornmeal in a pot.

  2. Add fine flour, sugar or molasses, baking soda, and salt to the scalded cornmeal.

  3. Mix to form a batter and boil for at least 1 hour, stirring often, or cook in a tin pail set in boiling water.

Serve and use leftovers

  1. Serve as mush with butter, sugar, and milk for supper.

  2. The next morning, thin the leftover mush with hot water, add eggs, and bake as muffins or griddle cakes.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Cornmeal (in the method)
Forms the bulk of the mush and sets into a thick, starchy body as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the thinned mush and add structure to the muffins or griddle cakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic molasses or batter to help the cakes rise and brown.
Sugar or molasses
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown during baking or frying.

The step that matters

Boiling the mush for at least 1 hour. Cornmeal starch must fully gelatinize in boiling water to become tender and digestible. Stirring often prevents scorching on the bottom of the pot 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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