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Fried Cornmeal Nut Cakes
2 cupfuls yellow cornmeal 2 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 3 cupfuls boiling water 1 teaspoonful salt 1 egg 1/2 cupful chopped nut meats Bring water and salt to boil, stir in cornmeal, add nut meats, and stir and cook ten minutes. Remove from fire and add egg well beaten, and melted Crisco. Turn into Criscoed tin and cool. when cold, slice and fry in hot Crisco. serve with honey or maple syrup.
Sufficient for eight slices.
A cornmeal mush loaf, chilled, sliced and pan-fried — essentially scrapple without the meat. The whole thing hinges on the mush being cooked stiff enough and chilled long enough to slice cleanly.
- CriscoThis is a Procter & Gamble promotional book, hence Crisco in every line. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works: vegetable shortening, oil, butter or bacon fat for frying. Two tablespoons in the batch, plus enough in the pan to come partway up the slices.
- Cook it longer than ten minutesTen minutes of stirring will hydrate the cornmeal but leaves a raw, chalky edge in coarser modern meal. Twenty to thirty minutes over low heat, covered and stirred occasionally, gives a smoother loaf that holds together in the pan.
- Yellow cornmealUse plain stone-ground or degerminated yellow cornmeal, not self-rising cornmeal mix and not corn flour. A medium grind sets firmest.
- The panA "Criscoed tin" is simply a greased tin; since the loaf is to be sliced, a loaf tin is the obvious choice. A standard 8½ x 4½ inch pan gives slices of a good size; line it with plastic wrap or parchment and unmoulding is trivial.
- Chill properly"Cool" means thoroughly cold — refrigerate at least four hours, better overnight. Warm mush crumbles the moment it hits the fat.
- Slicing and fryingCut slices about ½ inch thick. Fry over medium heat, four to five minutes a side, and leave them alone until a crust forms; turning early tears the surface.
- NutsWalnuts, pecans or hickory nuts all suit. Toast them first if you want the flavour to carry through the frying.
- YieldEight slices, so four modest servings at breakfast with honey or maple syrup.
Fried cornmeal mush is one of the oldest American breakfast economies: boil meal into porridge, let the surplus set overnight, slice and fry it the next morning. It runs from colonial hasty pudding through the Pennsylvania scrapple tradition and the Midwestern breakfast table, and it survives in supermarkets today as tubes of ready-sliced polenta. What marks this version as early twentieth century is the shortening. Crisco was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and the company promoted it hard through recipe booklets in which the product appears in nearly every dish — here it greases the tin, enriches the mush and fries the slices. The chopped nut meats are the other period touch; nuts were often recommended in this era as a way of adding food value to plain starchy dishes, though how widely home cooks took up the idea is not documented.