Home › Cereals › Corn Meal Mush
Corn Meal Mush
4 cups boiling water. 1 cup corn meal. 1 teaspoon salt. Boil 10 minutes, stirring constantly, then longer in double boiler.
A bare-bones formula for what most American cooks now call polenta. The proportions are sound; only the cooking time is understated for modern meal.
- Lump insuranceWhisk the cornmeal into the boiling water in a thin stream rather than dumping it in, or stir it first into a cup of cold water to make a slurry. This is the one step that decides whether the mush is smooth or gritty with lumps.
- Corn mealRead this as plain unbolted or bolted yellow or white meal. Do not substitute the self-rising cornmeal mix sold in the South, which contains leavening and salt. Stone-ground meal gives more flavor and needs the longer end of the cooking time.
- The real timingTen minutes of direct boiling only sets the starch. Plan on 30 to 45 minutes total over the double boiler for coarse meal; the mush is done when it tastes of corn rather than raw starch and pulls away from the side of the pan.
- Double boilerThe point of it is that mush scorches easily once thick. A heavy-bottomed saucepan on the lowest burner setting, lid on, stirred every five minutes, does the same job.
- Consistency4:1 water to meal by volume gives a pourable breakfast porridge. For mush firm enough to slice and fry, use 3 cups water to 1 cup meal, or simply cook the 4-cup version down longer.
- YieldRoughly 4 cups cooked, enough for about four at breakfast. The recipe gives no yield and no serving suggestion; milk and molasses, maple syrup, or butter are the usual accompaniments.
- Fried mushLeftovers can be poured into a loaf pan, chilled overnight until solid, turned out and cut into half-inch slices, then fried in bacon fat or butter until crisp on both sides. Fried mush was a common use for cold mush, though this recipe does not mention it.
Cornmeal mush is often traced to Native American boiled ground maize, adopted by colonists who had known the same dish made with oats or barley and who called the meal "Indian meal" well into the nineteenth century. Under one name or another it turns up everywhere corn grows: polenta in northern Italy, mamaliga in Romania, grits and hasty pudding in America. Its place in a 1920 book is telling: Mrs. Wilson wrote through the food-conservation years of the First World War, when wheat was directed to the armies and government campaigns pushed corn on the home front. A pot of mush was cheap, filling, and it fried up the next morning, which is exactly the kind of economy her cookbook was built to teach.