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Cereal Left-Overs: Drain
Lift them out and lay on a hot platter. Cut cold mush in neat slices, dip in flour, egg, and crumbs. Fry in hot fat till brown and crisp on both sides. Drain on soft paper and serve with the bacon. This makes a delicious breakfast dish.
Fried Mush.
If there is any cornmeal mush left from breakfast, do not scrape it in cold spoonfuls into a bowl; reheat and allow it to become smooth, then pour into a square cake tin; calculate the amount of mush to the size of the tin, so it will make a cake two inches in depth. Cover when it cools and set in the refrigerator. When it is needed for breakfast or supper, cut into squares about four inches in size and roll them in flour until dry. Drop into smoking hot fat and fry brown. Drain, and serve hot with maple sirup.
The page opens mid-sentence — the tail of a bacon-and-fried-mush recipe — and then restarts as "Fried Mush" proper. Two coatings are described: a full flour-egg-crumb breading, and a simple dusting of flour. Both work; the flour-only version is the classic.
- What mush isCornmeal cooked in salted water to a thick porridge, roughly 1 part medium-grind cornmeal to 4 parts water, simmered 20-30 minutes. The recipe assumes you already have leftovers; if you are starting from scratch, cook it the day before.
- The hinge is the chillingMush must be poured out hot and fluid so it sets as one solid block, and it must be thoroughly cold — at least 4 hours, better overnight — before slicing. Warm or lumpy mush crumbles in the fat and you end up with cornmeal soup.
- Reheat before pouringCold scraped-up mush will not knit together. Warm it with a splash of water or milk and beat it smooth first, exactly as instructed, or the slices will split along the seams.
- Tin size and thicknessA 2-inch depth in a square cake tin is generous; an 8-inch square pan takes roughly 9 cups of mush for that depth. A 1-inch slab in a loaf pan fries faster and more evenly.
- Four-inch squaresThat is a very large piece — one per person, the way a slab of polenta is served. Cut smaller if you want the crust-to-interior ratio of a standard breakfast portion.
- "Smoking hot fat"Read this as 365-375F, deep enough to half-submerge the slices. Lard or a neutral oil; if the fat actually smokes it is past its point and will taste scorched. Fry 3-4 minutes a side.
- Dry the surfaceRolling "in flour until dry" is doing real work — surface moisture from the refrigerator makes the fat spit and keeps the crust from forming. Blot the squares before flouring.
- Draining"Soft paper" means paper towels or a brown bag; a wire rack is better still, since paper traps steam under the bottom crust.
- YieldAn 8-inch pan cut into four-inch squares gives four pieces — one breakfast for four, with bacon or maple syrup.
Fried mush is the second life of cornmeal porridge, and it appears in a book of household economies for exactly that reason: the point is not to waste the pot. Cornmeal mush was a staple breakfast across nineteenth-century America — thin and hot in a bowl at first, then chilled, sliced and fried when what was left had firmed up. The same maneuver runs through European kitchens as fried polenta and through the American South as fried grits cakes, and in Pennsylvania the mush loaf was extended with pork scraps and became scrapple. Sequences like this one — porridge, then chilled slab, then crisp fried cake — are a good index of how a period household thought about food: a single kettle of meal was expected to yield two meals in two different forms.