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Corn Meal Mush
1 cup corn meal 4 cups boiling water 1½ teaspoons salt Salt water, add corn meal, a little at a time, until all is used, boil five minutes, and cook in double boiler three hours.
Sautéd or Fried Corn Meal Mush 1 cup corn meal ½ cup white flour 4 cups boiling water 2 teaspoons salt Cook in the same way as corn meal mush, pour while hot into greased bread pan or baking powder box. When cold, slice and sauté in pork fat, first on one side and then on the other; or fry in deep fat.
Two recipes in one entry: a plain boiled mush and a firmer version meant to be chilled, sliced and fried. The long double-boiler cooking is the whole point of the first, and the flour is the whole point of the second.
- The hinge: add the meal slowlyCornmeal dumped into boiling water all at once seizes into lumps that never disperse. Rain it in a little at a time while whisking hard, exactly as written.
- Three hours is not a misprintStone-ground meal of the period was coarser than most supermarket cornmeal, and the double boiler cannot scorch it. With modern medium-grind meal you will have edible mush in 30 to 45 minutes, but the long cooking genuinely improves texture and removes any raw starch taste. Top up the lower pan with water as it boils away.
- Corn mealUse yellow or white cornmeal, medium grind — not the degerminated fine flour sold as corn flour, and not masa harina, which is nixtamalized and behaves differently. Coarse polenta grind works and wants the longer cooking.
- ProportionsOne cup meal to four cups water is a fairly loose 1:4 mush, right for eating hot with milk or syrup. The fried version thickens further because of the added half cup of flour, which is what lets it hold a clean slice.
- "Baking powder box"A tall cylindrical tin, giving round slices. A loaf pan, a clean 28-oz can, or a small terrine all work; grease it and press plastic wrap on the surface to stop a skin forming.
- Chilling"When cold" means thoroughly cold — at least four hours, better overnight in the refrigerator. Slices cut from barely cooled mush collapse in the pan.
- Pork fatRendered lard or bacon drippings, and it matters to the flavor. Get the fat hot before the slices go in and leave them alone until a crust forms, four or five minutes a side, or they will tear.
- YieldAbout four cups of hot mush, serving four; the number of half-inch slices from the fried version will depend on the size of the pan or tin used.
Boiled cornmeal is one of the oldest continuously eaten dishes in North America, adapted by English colonists from Indigenous preparations of ground maize and recorded through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as mush, hasty pudding, or supawn. The fried version in this entry is the thrifty second act: yesterday's mush set firm, sliced and crisped in pork fat, served with molasses or syrup for breakfast — the same logic that produced Italian fried polenta and, with the addition of scraps and buckwheat, Pennsylvania scrapple. Lowney's book, published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, is best remembered for its chocolate recipes, but it was built out as a full household manual, as promotional cookbooks of the era often were, which is why a plain mush sits a few pages from the confectionery.