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Corn-Meal Mush
1/2 cup corn meal 1 teaspoon salt 2¾ cups water Slowly stir the meal into the boiling salted water, being careful not to allow it to lump. Let boil slowly for ten minutes; place in cooker and allow to remain eight to ten hours or over night. If you wish to fry the mush use only two cups of water.
A fireless cooker was an insulated box that finished food on retained heat after a short boil on the stove. The recipe is sound, but the equipment needs translating.
- What the cooker wasA fireless (or "hay box") cooker held a heated pot in heavy insulation so it coasted down slowly from boiling over many hours. A heavy Dutch oven wrapped in towels inside a cooler approximates it; a slow cooker on low, or a covered pot in a 200F oven, gets you the same soft overnight mush with less guesswork.
- Keep it hot or chill itCooked cereal that sits for hours between about 40F and 140F is the classic medium for Bacillus cereus, whose spores survive boiling. If you hold the mush overnight, hold it genuinely hot (above 140F); if you are making it to fry, cool it quickly and refrigerate rather than leaving it on the counter.
- No lumpsRather than stirring dry meal into boiling water, slake the 1/2 cup of cornmeal in about 1/2 cup of the cold water first, then stir that slurry into the rest, boiling and salted. The starch hydrates evenly and the ten-minute boil goes untended.
- The meal itselfPeriod cornmeal was usually stone-ground and coarser than today's degerminated supermarket meal, which is why it wanted such long soft cooking. Stone-ground yellow or white meal gives the intended texture and flavour; fine instant polenta will be done in minutes and needs no cooker at all.
- The two water measures2 3/4 cups water to 1/2 cup meal is a loose porridge for eating with milk and sugar or molasses. The 2-cup version sets firm enough to slice, which is the whole point of the fried variant.
- Frying itPour the stiff mush into a small loaf pan, chill until fully set, turn out and cut 1/2-inch slices. Fry in bacon fat or butter over medium heat until a crust forms on each side, about 4 to 5 minutes a side; moving it too early tears the slices.
- SaltA teaspoon of salt to half a cup of meal is assertive by modern habit but correct for plain mush eaten with sweet accompaniments. Scale it back if the mush is going under gravy or sausage.
- YieldMakes roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups cooked, enough for two generous or three modest servings; the stiff version gives a pan's worth of 1/2-inch slices.
Cornmeal mush is the plain American descendant of the same porridge that Italians call polenta and colonial New Englanders called hasty pudding: ground maize, water, salt, and time. Its appearance in a fireless-cookery chapter is telling. Insulated cookers were promoted heavily in the first quarter of the twentieth century as fuel savers and labour savers, and grain porridges seem to have suited them well, since a long, gentle, unattended cooking is exactly what coarse meal wants and exactly what a wood or coal range made expensive. The overnight instruction assumes a household that wanted breakfast ready without lighting the stove first. The fried variant, chilled in a pan and browned in fat, is the same thrift running one day into the next, and it is a close contemporary of the sliced fried mush still sold in the mid-Atlantic states alongside scrapple.