Mush Bread
1 pint sweet milk. 1 pint cornmeal. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1 teaspoon butter. Heat milk to scalding point, stir in slowly meal. When done remove from fire, add butter, salt and beat well. Then add one egg beaten separately. Bake until light brown in a buttered dish.
WAFFLES (VERY DELICATE). 1 1/2 cups flour. 2 teaspoons baking powder. 1 tablespoon melted butter or crisco. 1/4 cup corn starch. 1 cup rich milk. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 3 beaten eggs.
Sift dry ingredients together. Beat eggs, add milk and stir in flour. Add butter. Cook in hot greased irons and serve.
Two recipes share this page: a spoonbread-style mush bread and a light waffle batter. Both are workable as written, but the mush bread gives no oven temperature or time, and the ratio of meal to milk is heavier than most modern spoonbreads.
- The hinge: cook the mush properly firstAdd the cornmeal to scalding milk in a slow stream, whisking, and keep it over low heat until it thickens into a stiff porridge that pulls from the pan. "When done" means the raw starch taste is gone, three to five minutes. Undercooked mush gives a gritty, sandy loaf.
- Temper the eggLet the mush cool for several minutes before the beaten egg goes in, or beat a spoonful of hot mush into the egg first. Added straight to scalding mush the egg scrambles and you lose the lift.
- Oven temperature and timeNone is given. A moderately hot oven, 375F, for 35 to 45 minutes in a buttered 1 to 1.5 quart dish will brown the top and set the centre. It should still be soft and spoonable inside.
- Sweet milkFresh unsoured milk, named to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which calls for soda rather than baking powder.
- The cornmealEqual volumes of milk and meal makes a very stiff mush by modern standards. Fine white or yellow meal works; stone-ground coarse meal will absorb more liquid and may want another half cup of milk.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a side. Spoon it out hot with butter; it does not slice and it collapses as it cools.
- Crisco in the wafflesInterchangeable here with any neutral oil or melted butter. The cornstarch is doing the delicacy work, diluting the flour's gluten for a tenderer waffle.
- Waffle ironsThe recipe assumes a stovetop cast-iron waffle iron, heated and greased for each round. An electric iron at medium-high needs no greasing beyond the first batch. Makes about four to six waffles.
Mush bread is one of the many regional names for what is now generally called spoonbread: cornmeal cooked to a porridge, enriched with egg and milk, and baked into something between a bread and a pudding. It descends from the plain boiled cornmeal mush that fed households across the American colonies and after, with eggs and dairy turning a subsistence dish into a company one. The name records the method, and the fact that it is eaten with a spoon.