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Fried Mush
A delicious breakfast relish is made by slicing cold mush thin and frying in a little hot lard. Or dip in beaten eggs salted to taste, then in bread or cracker crumbs, and drop in hot lard, like doughnuts.-Miss A. W. S., Nashville, Tenn.
This assumes you already have a pan of cold cornmeal mush in the pantry, which most nineteenth-century kitchens did. Everything depends on the mush being cold, firm and dry enough to slice.
- What "mush" isCornmeal simmered in salted water to a thick porridge, poured into a loaf pan or bowl and left to set. Roughly 1 cup cornmeal to 4 cups water with a teaspoon of salt, cooked 20-30 minutes until it pulls from the sides of the pot, then chilled at least 4 hours and preferably overnight.
- The hinge: chill it hardMush that is only cool will slump and stick, and the slices break in the pan. Refrigerate until it is set solid enough to cut clean slices with a knife, then blot the cut faces dry before they meet the fat.
- Slice thicknessThe recipe says only "thin"; somewhere around 1/3 to 1/2 inch works. Thinner and the slice has no interior left once the crust forms; much thicker and the middle stays cold and pasty.
- Lard and substitutesLard is still the best choice for flavour and browning; bacon drippings are the traditional stand-in and vegetable shortening or a neutral oil work. For the plain version use a shallow film in a heavy skillet over medium heat and do not crowd the pan.
- "Like doughnuts"The second method is deep-frying: enough fat to float the slices. The book gives no number, but modern doughnut frying is around 360-375F, and the crumb coating will brown in a minute or two before it needs turning, well before the interior overheats, since the mush is already fully cooked.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod cracker crumbs came from plain soda or water crackers, closer to saltines than to modern seasoned crumbs. Saltines crushed fine, or dry breadcrumbs, give the right result; panko is coarser than intended but not wrong.
- Serving and yieldA standard loaf pan of mush yields about 16 slices, enough for four. Served hot with butter and molasses, sorghum or maple syrup, or alongside sausage and eggs as the "relish" the note describes.
Fried mush is what a thrifty household did with yesterday's cornmeal porridge, and the fact that it appears here as a "breakfast relish" rather than a dish in its own right tells you how routine it was. Cornmeal boiled to a mush was one of the cheapest hot foods in America through the nineteenth century, eaten soft with milk in the evening and sliced and fried the next morning; the Italian-American polenta fritta and the Southern fried grits cake are versions of the same idea. Buckeye Cookery, which began as the Buckeye Cookbook at Marysville, Ohio, in 1876 and appeared in its expanded form as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping in Minneapolis in 1877, is full of these initialled one-line economies — this very recipe is signed "Miss A. W. S." — and the Nashville attribution is a reminder that the book drew on Southern kitchens as well as Midwestern ones. The instruction to fry "like doughnuts" is a useful period shorthand: the reader was assumed to know the heat and depth of fat for doughnuts without being told a number.