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Corn Mush
Put four quarts fresh water in a kettle to boil, salt to suit the taste; when it begins to boil stir in one and one-half quarts meal, letting it sift through the fingers slowly to prevent lumps, adding it a little faster at the last, until as thick as can be conveniently stirred with one hand; set in the oven in the kettle (or take out into a pan), bake an hour, and it will be thoroughly cooked. It takes corn meal so long to cook thoroughly that it is very difficult to boil it until done without burning. Excellent for frying when cold. Use a hard wood paddle, two feet long, with a blade two inches wide and seven inches long, to stir with. The thorough cooking and baking in oven afterwards, takes away all the raw taste that mush is apt to have, and adds much to its sweetness and delicious flavor.- Mrs. W. W. Woods.
A large-batch cornmeal mush, notable mainly for finishing in the oven rather than fighting a scorching pot on the stove. The proportions are generous by modern standards and scale down cleanly.
- Yield and scalingFour quarts of water to a quart and a half of meal makes roughly five quarts of mush, enough for a dozen or more servings plus a pan to slice and fry. A quarter batch (1 quart water, about 1.5 cups meal, 1 teaspoon salt) suits most households.
- The oven temperatureNone is given; the recipe says only 'set in the oven.' A moderate oven, around 350F, answers for the hour of baking. An hour uncovered at that heat will set a firm skin; cover the pot if you want the surface soft.
- The kettleThe recipe says only 'kettle,' meaning a heavy lidded pot that can go from the fire or burner into the oven. A Dutch oven is the direct equivalent. Thin stainless will scorch on the stovetop stage before the meal ever reaches the oven.
- Adding the mealThe instruction to sift it slowly through the fingers is the hinge of the recipe. Dumping the meal in produces lumps that no amount of stirring will break. A slow steady stream into hard-boiling, constantly stirred water is the only reliable method; a whisk works as well as the paddle for a small batch.
- The paddleThe recipe specifies a hardwood paddle two feet long with a blade two inches wide and seven inches long. That length gives reach and leverage in a full kettle of thickening mush, and keeps the hand back from a pot that spits as it stiffens. For a scaled-down batch a long wooden spoon is enough, but keep your forearm out of the pot.
- Which cornmealNineteenth-century meal was stone-ground and whole, with the germ intact, and drank more water than modern degerminated supermarket meal. If you use whole-grain or stone-ground meal you may need a little extra water; if you use fine degerminated meal, hold some back, as it thickens faster and harder.
- Salt'Salt to suit the taste' means salting the water before the meal goes in, not the finished mush. Reckon about a teaspoon of fine salt per quart of water; mush salted only after cooking tends to taste flat.
- Frying the cold mushPour the leftovers into a loaf pan, chill thoroughly, then turn out and cut half-inch slices. They must be cold and firm all through or they will fall apart in the pan. Fry in bacon fat or butter until crusted on both sides and serve with syrup or molasses.
Mush is the plainest form of one of the oldest cooked dishes in North America: cornmeal stirred into boiling salted water, a technique European settlers are generally said to have learned from Indigenous cooks and then carried into farm kitchens across the eastern United States. The same basic preparation is polenta in northern Italy and hasty pudding in colonial New England, and the chilled-and-fried version is closely related to Pennsylvania scrapple, which combines cornmeal with meat and offal. What makes this contribution to Buckeye Cookery worth reading is its argument rather than its ingredients: the writer holds that ordinary boiled mush tastes raw, and that an hour in the oven after the stovetop stirring cooks the starch through and brings out sweetness. That was a real problem with coarse stone-ground whole meal, which needed longer cooking than the finely milled degerminated product sold today, and the finishing bake was a practical answer to a pot that would scorch before the grain softened. The recipe carries the name of its contributor, as many in the book do; Buckeye Cookery was assembled from Ohio housewives' own kitchen practice and published in Minneapolis, first appearing in 1877.