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Fried Corn Meal Mush
Packing hasty pudding in granite pans, cutting it into slices and frying it makes a good dish. In Italy, polenta is spread out in thin layers on a board, and cut in small blocks. These blocks are crumbed and fried in deep oil or butter. Another method is to mix corn meal in three times its value of water, and cook it in water only long enough to form a mush, and complete the cooking by frying the meal in butter. This is not so stiff as ordinary fried corn meal mush.
Three methods are folded into one short paragraph here: slice-and-fry, the Italian crumbed block, and a looser mush finished in the pan. All of them depend on the same thing — a mush cooked long enough that the cornmeal has fully hydrated.
- The hinge: cook the mush longer than seems necessaryCornmeal that has only just thickened still tastes raw and chalky, and it will not set firmly enough to slice. Simmer the mush at least 20 to 30 minutes, stirring often, before it goes into the pan to chill. The third method in the text deliberately shortcuts this and finishes the cooking in butter, which is why it stays soft.
- Hasty puddingPlain cornmeal mush: coarse yellow or white cornmeal stirred into salted boiling water. Nothing hasty about it by modern standards.
- "Granite pans"Speckled grey enamelled steel, the standard cheap cookware of the period. Any loaf pan works; a straight-sided one gives neater slices. Line it or oil it so the set block turns out whole.
- "Three times its value of water"Apparently three times the volume of the cornmeal, a tighter ratio than the four to five parts water to one of meal common in modern mush. Note that the text itself says this version comes out "not so stiff as ordinary fried corn meal mush," which it puts down to the shortened boiling rather than the ratio.
- Setting timeThe mush must be thoroughly cold before slicing or it will crumble in the pan. Several hours, or overnight in the refrigerator, is right. Cut slices about half an inch thick.
- FryingButter alone scorches at the temperature needed to crisp the surface; use butter with a little oil, or clarified butter, in a heavy skillet over medium heat. Leave each slice undisturbed for four or five minutes a side — moving it early tears the crust off.
- The Italian crumbed methodCooled polenta cut into blocks, crumbed and fried in deep fat, as the text says. Modern practice would flour, egg and breadcrumb them; deep fat at 360-375F, in small batches.
- Yield and servingA cup of dry cornmeal makes roughly a small loaf pan of set mush, enough for two to three servings as a main; slice thickness will decide the count. Commonly eaten with maple syrup or molasses at breakfast, or with tomato sauce and cheese when standing in for meat.
Cornmeal mush, fried or otherwise, has long been eaten in North America, and its two names point to the same food arriving from two directions: hasty pudding, the English boiled grain pudding transplanted onto Native American maize, and polenta, the northern Italian version of the same technique. Cookbooks of this general period leaned on cornmeal because it was cheap, domestic and filling -- the sort of thing that could occupy the centre of a plate where a chop used to be.