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Corn Meal Cutlets
Turn corn meal mush into bread tins previously wet with cold water; when cold, slice. Dip the sliced mush into bread crumbs. Place in a buttered pan, and bake in a quick oven until a rich brown. Serve with butter or maple syrup.
A two-stage recipe: cook a stiff cornmeal mush the day before, then slice and bake it the next morning. The original assumes you already know how to make mush, which is the part that decides whether the slices hold together.
- The mush itselfFor firm slices use roughly 1 cup cornmeal to 4 cups salted water, stirred in slowly and cooked 20 to 30 minutes until it pulls away from the pan. A soupy mush will never set enough to slice.
- Corn mealCornmeal of this period was often water-ground and coarser than most modern meal; colour varied by region, with white meal usual in parts of the South. Ordinary supermarket cornmeal works; avoid self-rising cornmeal mix and avoid cornstarch, which is a different product entirely.
- Bread tins wet with cold waterRinsing the loaf pan in cold water rather than greasing it lets the cold mush turn out cleanly in a block. A loaf pan lined with plastic wrap does the same job and is easier to unmould.
- When coldThis means thoroughly chilled, not merely cooled off. Several hours or overnight in the refrigerator; slices about half an inch thick hold their shape best.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. Bake on a buttered sheet or shallow pan, turning once, until the crumb coating is deep brown and crisp; start checking after about ten minutes a side.
- Dipping in crumbsPress the crumbs on firmly or much of the coating will end up in the pan. The original dips the plain slices; brushing with melted butter or beaten egg first departs from the recipe, though it helps the crumbs adhere.
- Yield and servingA loaf pan of mush yields roughly a dozen or more slices, enough for about four. Butter and maple syrup, as the recipe directs, make it a breakfast dish; a mushroom or tomato gravy would push it toward supper, though the recipe itself suggests only butter or syrup.
Cornmeal mush, chilled and sliced and then fried or baked, is a long-established American dish with roots in Native American preparations of boiled ground maize; similar chilled-and-sliced treatments appear in Pennsylvania scrapple and, by a separate European route, in Italian polenta fritters. Calling the slices "cutlets" suggests a meat-substitute framing, a cutlet meaning a thin slice of veal or mutton, though grain and legume "cutlets" also appear in mainstream cookbooks of the period. Vegetarian and reform cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did borrow butcher's vocabulary to make a plate of grain or legume read as a main course rather than a side dish. Meatless cookery of the period was driven by several currents at once, including Seventh-day Adventist and other religious dietary teaching, health-reform enthusiasm for whole grains, and simple economy, cornmeal being among the cheapest foods available. Serving the same slices with maple syrup for breakfast or with gravy at dinner was a practical virtue in a household cooking one pot of mush.