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Corn Meal Mush with Cheese (1)
Lay tablespoons of hot mush in a hot dish, sprinkling each with grated cheese and a dash of cayenne or paprika. Lay more tablespoons of mush on top of these, sprinkle with more cheese until all is used. Then eat as is or brown in oven.
This is an assembly note rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have a pot of hot cornmeal mush going. Everything depends on the mush being genuinely hot when it hits the cheese.
- The mush itselfCornmeal mush is roughly 1 cup cornmeal stirred into 4 cups salted boiling water, then cooked 20-30 minutes over low heat until it pulls from the side of the pan. It must be soft enough to drop from a spoon but stiff enough to hold a shape.
- Indian meal, cornmealOlder camp books use the terms interchangeably. Medium-grind yellow cornmeal is the right choice here; fine degerminated meal turns pasty and instant polenta sets too fast to layer.
- Hot dish means hotWarm the serving dish in the oven or with boiling water first. A cold plate chills the mush on contact and the cheese will sit on top unmelted rather than melting into the layers.
- CheeseA dry, sharp grating cheese works best - aged cheddar, or a hard sheep's cheese. Pre-shredded cheese is coated with starch and melts sullenly.
- BrowningThe recipe gives no temperature, only 'brown in oven'. A hot oven, around 400F, for 10-15 minutes will colour the top layer; a broiler for 2-3 minutes does the same job faster. Left much longer it will dry out.
- CayenneThe recipe calls for a dash of cayenne or paprika on the first layer. If you repeat it on each of four or five layers the heat accumulates quickly, so paprika is the milder of the two options offered.
- YieldA batch of mush from 1 cup of meal layered this way serves three or four as a side, two as a supper dish.
Cornmeal mush is one of the oldest continuously eaten dishes in North America, adopted by European settlers from Indigenous practice and known variously as mush, hasty pudding, or in its firmed and sliced form as fried mush. It survived into camp and outdoor cookery because it needs nothing but meal, water, salt and a pot, all of which travel well, and because the leftovers set solid overnight and can be sliced and fried the next morning. Layering it with grated cheese and pepper is the frugal cook's route to something richer without adding an ingredient that spoils quickly, and hard cheese keeps better unrefrigerated than most alternatives.