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Indian Meal Mush
A popular and substantial article of American food, prepared like the Irish stirabout or Scotch porridge. It requires longer boiling and more careful mixing than oatmeal. The meal should be mixed with boiling water or milk gradually, and stirred rapidly between each handful to prevent it from lumping. It requires long boiling, and when boiled is served with salt, sugar, and milk separately; or it may be put into a well-buttered basin and served, turned out, while still warm.
A method rather than a formula: no quantities are given, so the ratios and timings below come from standard practice for cornmeal mush.
- Indian meal is cornmeal"Indian meal" is nineteenth-century English for maize meal, ground medium or coarse rather than the fine degerminated grind sold as cornmeal today. Stone-ground medium cornmeal, or polenta, is the closest match; instant polenta will not behave the way this entry assumes.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. A workable starting point is 1 cup cornmeal to 4 cups water or milk, plus a teaspoon of salt in the liquid, which yields roughly four servings.
- The hinge is the additionEverything here turns on adding the meal to boiling liquid slowly, a handful at a time, stirring hard between each. Cornmeal hydrates and gels instantly; dumped in at once it seizes into lumps that no amount of later beating will break down. Some cooks slake the meal in an equal volume of cold water first, which is more forgiving.
- "Long boiling" means longCoarse cornmeal wants 30 to 45 minutes over low heat, stirred often, to cook out the raw starchy taste. Five minutes gives a mush that thickens but still tastes of raw grain. A heavy pan and a low flame matter, since mush scorches readily and spits as it thickens.
- Milk needs watchingMade with milk it catches on the bottom of the pan far more easily than water. Either use a double boiler, which suits the long cooking, or use water for the boiling and pour cold milk over at the table, which is what the entry describes.
- The buttered basinA pudding basin is a plain round-bottomed bowl. Poured in warm and turned out, the mush sets into a dome; left to go cold and firm, it can be sliced and fried in butter or bacon fat the next morning, a common second life for a pot of mush.
- ServingSalt, sugar and milk are handed separately so each eater sweetens or salts to taste. Molasses, maple syrup and butter were also used in American households.
Cassell's files this under American food, and rightly: boiled maize meal is often said to have been an everyday grain dish in the United States through much of the nineteenth century, in the way oatmeal porridge was in Scotland and stirabout in Ireland. The name "Indian meal" preserves the older English habit of calling maize "Indian corn" to distinguish it from corn in the general sense of grain, and the technique itself is inherited, by way of colonial cooks, from Native American preparations of ground maize. The comparison the entry draws is the useful one for a British reader who had never met the grain: same pot, same spoon, same breakfast slot, but a meal that swells harder, lumps faster and needs a good deal more time on the fire than oats. The cold-set, sliced and fried leftover, which Cassell's only hints at with its buttered basin, is the direct ancestor of fried mush, and has its counterpart, in a coarser Italian register, in grilled polenta.