Well, gruel is somewhere between soup and stew. This one I made up for my own amusement (yet corniness is nothing new). Looking into it, there is more than one type of corn involved, so perhaps it’s the most veritable of cornycopias (or toss in some cornflakes for that matter, but they usually consist of more than maize).
ingredients
16 ounces of frozen corn (any cut sweetcorn variety)
1 cup of corn meal (cornmeal, which is ground dent corn, and is milled in various ways)
1-1/2 tablespoons of corn oil (also from field corn)
Boil frozen corn in 24 ounces of water for a few minutes.
Put the hot corn and water into a blender and puree it.
Set a fine mesh strainer over the pot it was cooked in, and dump the blended corn into the strainer.
Use a large spoon to press all of the liquid out of the collective pericarp (recycle that, it isn’t digestible, and if the cornmeal is whole grain, it’s easier to eat ground up).
Keep the pot of this corn broth warm on low heat.
In another pot, boil about 10 ounces of water (which could be started sooner), and add cornmeal to it, after stirring that in a bowl with 8 ounces of water (to prevent clumping when it hits the hot water). In other words, around 18 ounces of water is used there (or add more if you’d like to stir it longer, like polenta).
Stir at reduced heat until it becomes thick like porridge (adding the oil here may help).
Set the pot on a trivet.
Pour the corn broth into the pot of cooked cornmeal, briefly stir together with added corn oil (if not used elsewhere). Optionally include salt & pepper to taste (or cook those with the rest of that, if you know how much you like). Speaking of stew, this could be thickened with cornstarch (or just cook the cornmeal in the corn broth without extra water). The appeal to me though is more than one corn flavor and texture when it’s something of a soup too.
Eat the gruel out of the pot, like the cornivore you are. 