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Cereal Breakfast Food (Serve with cream and sugar)
3. Serve with cream and sugar.
Note. A small baked apple or baked pear may be served with the cereal in winter when fresh fruit is scarce.
Baked Apple. 6 sour apples 6 T. sugar 1/4 t. cinnamon 1½ t. butter 1/2 C. cold water 1. Wash and core apples. 2. Put into a graniteware baking dish. 3. Fill cavities with sugar and cinnamon and place 1/4 t. butter on top of each. 4.
Surround with water and bake until soft. 5. Serve hot or cold with cream or with the syrup in which they were baked.
Note. Currants or English walnuts may be mixed with the sugar and filled into the cavities of the apples.
Apples are sometimes pared before baking, but they do not keep their shape as well and do not cook as quickly as when baked in their skins.
Corn Meal Mush.
1/2 C. corn meal 1 t. salt 2+ C. water 1. Follow general directions for cooking and cook two hours. 2. Serve with butter and sugar, or cream and sugar, or pack into a brick-shaped bread pan which has been wet in cold water. When cold it can be cut in slices and fried.
Note.-If corn meal is very fine, mix with 1/2 C. cold water before adding to the boiling water, to prevent lumping.
Fried Mush. 1. Dip slices of cold mush in flour or fine crumbs and saute in butter until a light brown. 2. Serve with butter and maple syrup.
Note. Wheat or oat mush or cold, boiled rice may be cooked in this manner.
A page from a school domestic-science manual, so the measurements are abbreviated to initials and several quantities have been lost in printing. Here is what the shorthand means and where modern practice differs.
- The abbreviationsC. is cup, T. is tablespoon, t. is teaspoon. Domestic-science manuals of this type generally intended level measures, though this page does not say so.
- Missing quantitiesThe cornmeal mush reads "C. corn meal" and "2+ C. water" — the fractions appear to have dropped out of the type. Mush of this period is usually made somewhere around 1 part meal to 4 or 5 parts water by volume, plus the teaspoon of salt; the printed figures as they stand are unusable.
- "General directions for cooking"This refers back to a method given elsewhere in the manual and not reproduced here. The recipe's own note (mixing fine meal with cold water "before adding to the boiling water") confirms the meal went into salted boiling water; manuals of this type commonly then finished long-cooked cereals in a double boiler.
- Two hours for mushLong double-boiler cooking suited the coarse, stone-ground meal of the period. Modern degerminated cornmeal thickens in 10 to 15 minutes over direct heat with stirring; coarse stone-ground meal still benefits from 40 minutes or so, and the double boiler remains the safest vessel for it.
- Sour applesMeans a tart cooking apple that holds shape — Granny Smith, Northern Spy, Rhode Island Greening. Softer dessert varieties tend to break down into sauce over this long a bake.
- Oven for the applesNo temperature is given; ranges of the period rarely had a reliable oven thermometer. Bake at 350F for 40 to 50 minutes, until a skewer meets no resistance at the shoulder of the apple. Baste once or twice with the pan liquid.
- GranitewareEnameled steel, then the standard cheap ovenware. Any non-reactive dish works; avoid bare cast iron or aluminum, which the apple acid will discolor.
- Frying the mushThe mush must be thoroughly cold and firm before slicing, so pack it the day before. Slices about half an inch thick, floured, into butter or a butter-and-oil mix hot enough to sizzle on contact — cool fat makes them absorb grease and break up.
- YieldSix baked apples serve six. The mush yield cannot be worked out, since the meal and water quantities are missing from the type; assume it is a small family batch, enough to fill one bread pan for frying.
This page belongs to the era when cooked cereal was the moral center of the American breakfast, and when domestic science was being taught as a laboratory subject: hence the numbered steps, the ingredient list set out like a formula, and the assumption that a class of students would work from a shared set of "general directions" for the double boiler. Cornmeal mush was among the oldest continuously eaten dishes in the country, adapted from Indigenous preparations of ground maize and known regionally as hasty pudding, and the trick of chilling it in a bread pan and frying the slices is the same economy that produces polenta fritta in northern Italy and scrapple in Pennsylvania. The note about baked apples serving in winter "when fresh fruit is scarce" is a plain reminder of the pre-refrigeration calendar: barreled keeping apples were a mainstay of the winter larder, alongside dried fruit, preserves and shipped citrus.