Marjorie Bentley
SAMP
PORRIDGE
2 cups samp 1 cup beans 4 pounds corned beef ½ pound salt pork 5 quarts cold water Wash and soak samp and beans over night. Put on to cook with the five quarts of water at 9 A.M. Take out
The page is a fragment: it opens mid-instruction from the previous recipe and breaks off at "Take out," so the finish is missing. What survives is enough to cook by, since samp porridge is essentially one long simmer.
- SampCoarsely broken dried corn, closer to grits or hominy than to cornmeal. Coarse yellow or white grits, or dried hominy, is the usable substitute; whole hominy will need the full soak and the full cooking time.
- The overnight soak is not optionalThe overnight soak -- The recipe calls for soaking both samp and beans overnight, and it is worth following: unsoaked corn is slow to soften and will likely still be gritty by the time the beans have collapsed.
- 9 A.M.The clock reference implies a very long, slow pot: the recipe expects the cook to start in the morning, though the fragment breaks off before giving a finishing time. The corned beef and pork will be tender well before the samp is.
- "Take out"The text breaks off here; the instruction was most likely to lift out the meats once tender and either return them to the pot or serve them alongside while the samp finishes thickening. Check the beef for tenderness as it cooks.
- SaltFour pounds of corned beef and a pound and a half of salt pork season the whole pot. Add no salt at the start; taste only near the end, and if the brine on your beef is heavy, blanch it briefly first and discard that water.
- ConsistencySamp swells enormously and the finished porridge should be thick enough to hold a spoon upright. Stir often in the last hour, scraping the bottom, or the corn will scorch and flavour the whole pot.
- YieldFive quarts of water plus five and a half pounds of meat is a farmhouse quantity, twelve or more generous servings. It thickens further overnight and leftovers were reheated.
Samp porridge belongs to southern New England, above all to Rhode Island, where it was a standing winter dish well into the twentieth century. The word samp comes from the Narragansett nasaump, meaning softened or soaked corn, and the technique of pounding dried maize coarse and boiling it for hours is Indigenous in origin; the corned beef and salt pork are the colonial addition, turning a grain porridge into a full one-pot dinner built from the two meats a household kept in brine year round.