Couche Couche
Make a paste as you make for corn bread by the above receipt. Sweeten it with sugar. Instead of putting it in a pan, you grease a pot with lard, and as the paste cooks to the side of the pot, you scrape it off with a spoon. Do that five or six times, until all your paste is cooked. It is delicious for breakfast with coffee. The Southern children are very fond of it with milk.
A Louisiana breakfast classic — cornmeal batter fried in a heavy pot until crumbly and crisp-edged.
- Start from a cornbread batterUse a basic cornmeal batter like the ones above, lightly sweetened with sugar.
- A well-greased heavy potGrease a cast-iron pot or skillet generously with lard or oil and get it hot before the batter goes in.
- Let a crust form, then scrapeAs the batter sets against the hot metal, scrape it up and stir; repeating this builds the signature crumbly, part-crisp texture.
- Serve it two waysTraditionally eaten hot in a bowl with milk, like a porridge, or with cane syrup and coffee.
- Cook low and patientKeep the heat moderate so the crust browns without scorching through the five or six scrapings.
Couche-couche is pure Louisiana — a fried cornmeal breakfast still beloved in Cajun and Creole country, eaten in a bowl with milk or cane syrup much like a hot cereal. Its very name invites comparison with North African couscous, and the two are widely thought to be linked, whether through the French colonial kitchen or the West African cooks who shaped so much of Louisiana’s food. The dish is a cousin of the cornmeal mushes eaten all across the early South, but the technique of frying and scraping the meal against a greased pot gives it a character all its own.
From page 55 of the 1904 edition.
Original page from the book
