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Fried Mush
If there is any corn-meal mush left from breakfast 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 a refrigerator. When it is needed for breakfast or supper, cut into squares about four inches in size and roll them in flour till quite dry. Drop into smoking hot fat and fry brown. Drain and serve hot with maple syrup.
A leftovers dish that depends entirely on the mush setting firm enough to hold a cut edge. Everything else is technique.
- Chill it hardThe hinge is thorough chilling. Warm or barely-set mush disintegrates in the fat; the pan needs at least four hours in the refrigerator, and overnight is better.
- Corn-meal mushPlain cornmeal cooked in salted water to a thick porridge, essentially the same preparation that becomes polenta. Coarser stone-ground meal is often said to set firmer than fine, degerminated supermarket meal.
- Reheat to smoothLeftover mush sets grainy and lumpy. Reheating and beating it hard is what gives the loaf an even, sliceable body.
- Those squares are enormousFour inches across and two inches deep is over a pound of mush per piece, and it will brown outside before the centre is hot. Slices half an inch thick and three inches across cook through and give a much better crust-to-interior ratio.
- Rolling in flour"Till quite dry" means the surface should look chalky, with no damp patches. Wet spots spit violently in the fat and shed their coating.
- Smoking hot fatAround 375F in a half-inch of neutral oil or lard. Below that the slices absorb grease and slump; a cube of bread browning in under a minute is the old test.
- Yield and servingAn 8-inch square tin filled to depth yields several dozen half-inch slices, far more than a single meal. Maple syrup is what the recipe calls for; sorghum and molasses are other period sweeteners.
Fried mush belongs to the long American tradition of cooking cornmeal twice — once as porridge, once again as a fried cake — and it appears in cookery collections precisely because it turns a breakfast remainder into a second meal at almost no cost. The same idea carries regional names: scrapple in Pennsylvania when meat scraps and broth go into the mush, polenta fritta in northern Italy. Cornmeal mush under various names was a staple of rural and working-class American diets through the nineteenth century, and books of this sort treat it less as a dish to plan than as a habit: never throw out the mush pot.