Home › The Principles of Cookery › Mush of Indian Corn
Mush of Indian Corn
A recipe for this wholesome dish is given by William Cobbett, in his "Treatise on Cobbett's Corn." "You put," he says, "some water or milk into a pot, and bring it to boil; you then let the flour or meal out of one hand gently into the milk or water, keeping stirring with the other, until you have got it into a pretty stiff state; after which you let it stand ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, or less, or ten only one minute, and then take it out, and put it into a dish or bowl. This sort of half pudding, half porridge, you eat either hot or cold, with a little salt, or without it. It is frequently eaten unaccompanied with any liquid matter; but the general way is to have a porringer of milk, and, taking off a lump of the mush and putting it into the milk, you take up a spoonful at a time, having a little milk along with it; and this is called mush and milk."
Cobbett gives proportions by feel rather than by measure, which is workable but leaves two things unsaid: how much meal, and how long it actually needs to cook. Both are worth pinning down.
- Indian corn mealThis means plain cornmeal, medium or coarse grind, not cornflour/cornstarch and not the fine degerminated meal sold for cornbread mixes. Stone-ground yellow or white meal gives the flavour Cobbett was arguing for.
- Proportions"A pretty stiff state" works out at roughly 4 parts liquid to 1 part meal by volume — 1 cup meal to 4 cups water or milk feeds four. Use 5 parts liquid for a looser porridge you can eat with a spoon straight from the pot.
- Cooking timeCobbett does not say how long the meal should be stirred; his ten minutes to a quarter of an hour is standing time after it has stiffened. Coarse cornmeal generally wants 20 to 30 minutes of gentle simmering, stirring often, or it can taste raw and gritty. The odd 'ten only one minute' in the text reads as a corruption of 'even only one minute'.
- Avoiding lumpsHis method — meal trickled from one hand while the other stirs — is the whole technique, and it works. If that feels precarious, whisk the meal into the cold liquid first and then bring it to the boil; lumps set hard and will not stir out later.
- Milk scorchesMush made with milk will catch on the bottom of the pan long before it thickens. Use a heavy pan, keep the heat low once it bubbles, and stir down into the corners. Water is the safer medium, with the milk poured over at the table as Cobbett describes.
- SaltAdd about half a teaspoon per cup of meal at the start rather than at the table. Cornmeal takes salt poorly once it has set.
- PorringerA small handled bowl, a common vessel for porridge and milk in the period; sizes varied, though a cup or so is typical. Any cereal bowl does the job.
- The cold versionPoured into a loaf tin and chilled overnight, the mush sets firm enough to turn out and slice. Sliced about half an inch thick and fried in butter or bacon fat until crisp, it becomes fried mush, which is arguably the better dish.
William Cobbett (1763–1835) was an English farmer, pamphleteer and political agitator who spent years in the United States, and his Treatise on Cobbett's Corn (1828) was part of a campaign to persuade English growers to take up maize — a fast-ripening variety he claimed would feed families and livestock on land that would not carry wheat. The campaign failed; the English climate and English taste both resisted. What survives in the treatise is a clear-eyed description of how American households actually ate corn, which is why the entry reads as a first-hand account instead of a recipe. Mush itself is older than Cobbett's book: boiled cornmeal porridge was taken from Native American cooking by the earliest English settlers and appears under a scatter of names, among them suppawn and hasty pudding. The habit of pressing yesterday's cold mush into a pan and frying it in slices is part of the same tradition, and is the ancestor of the fried mush still eaten in the American Midwest.