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Fried Mush Balls, or Fried Pone
1 pound of corn meal. 1 pint of boiling water. 4 tablespoonfuls of melted lard. 1 egg. 1/2 cup cold water. Salt.
Scald the meal with the boiling water; add the rest of the ingredients; flour your hands; make round balls, and fry in a saucepan of hot lard. They require long cooking.
No doubt it could be easily demonstrated that four cooks in a hotel kitchen accomplish more in the culinary line than do forty domes ic cooks in twenty private houses. No particular credit to the hotel cooks, but it is owing to the larger scale and system of their work, the greater capacities of their ranges and utensils, the labor-saving conveniences, water and drainage arrangements, and the larger quantities handled. It takes but little longer to cook five pounds than one, scarcely more trouble to make a gallon of soup for twenty persons than a quart for a family. But the emergencies are many, too. There has to be a dropping off and leaving out of many long and tedious processes. That which cannot be made in short time, is most likely not to be made at all, or else attempted and spoiled.
There are printed directions for numerous articles apparently desirable, that must be constantly stirred or otherwise worked one or two hours. To follow such in hotel work is simply impossible, it would require a small army of assistants. The common objection is valid--"O, we can't--there isn't time." The choice, then, lies between making many cheap and good preparations in a half-way manner; giving them up entirely, or finding out the reason why of the long processes and getting at the same results by shorter methods. There will be, it is hoped, many better illustrations than this of corn meal puddings, yet this will serve, and may the sooner establish an understanding of the motive of many directions that might otherwise seem peculiar. It is commonly said that corn meal puddings must bake three hours or longer, but in a hotel doing a healthy business it is extremely inconvenient to keep one minor article, and one so liable to burn, in the oven for that length of time. Fishes and meats have to go in and out, then vegetables and pastry; three hours baking involves three hours watching, and the strain upon memory lest it be neglected. There is no need of this. The only reason for long cooking is to cook the meal thoroughly, and that is better done in a saucepan with a lid on in any out-of-the-way corner, or even in a sink in the steam chest. To bake a pudding longer than till the eggs are well set, is generally an injury. What is at a certain point rich, smooth and custard-like, becomes, with longer baking, watery and inferior, through the curdling of the eggs, just as is seen to happen when a custard is allowed to boil. Cook the materials as much as you please before the eggs are put in, but very little after. Several puddings of corn meal have already been described, the next is a plainer and cheaper sort. Not necessarily the worse for that--it is mere matter of taste.
A stiff scalded cornmeal dough shaped into balls and deep-fried. The essay that follows the recipe in the original is Jessup Whitehead's argument about hotel timing rather than part of the method, but it does explain the one line that matters here: "they require long cooking."
- Cook the mush before you shape itThe hinge is getting the meal itself fully cooked. Frying alone will brown the outside long before the centre softens, so scald the meal with the boiling water and then hold it covered over low heat, or in a covered pan set in simmering water, until it tastes of cooked corn rather than raw starch. Whitehead makes exactly this point a few lines later: cook the material as much as you please before the egg goes in.
- Add the egg last and off the heatBeat in the melted lard, the cold water and the egg only after the mush has cooled to warm. Stirring egg into near-boiling mush scrambles it, which is the same curdling he describes in over-baked corn puddings.
- Fat temperature"A saucepan of hot lard" means deep fat, 2 to 3 inches, at 350-360F. Hotter than that and the crust sets and colours before the inside heats through; cooler and the balls drink fat. Fry in batches of four or five so the temperature holds.
- Size the balls smallKeep them to about 1 1/2 inches. At this size 5 to 7 minutes brings them to a deep gold with a hot centre; larger balls take correspondingly longer to heat through.
- Salt is unmeasuredThe original just says "Salt." For a pound of meal, about 2 teaspoons is in the right range. The recipe adds it with the other ingredients after scalding, though salting the scalding water season the meal more evenly.
- The mealNineteenth-century corn meal was commonly stone-ground and tended to be coarser than much supermarket meal today. Medium-grind yellow or white cornmeal works; very fine degerminated meal gives a pastier ball. Do not substitute corn flour or masa harina, which is nixtamalised and behaves differently.
- LardFour tablespoons in the dough, plus the frying fat. Lard is worth using for flavour and takes frying heat well, but shortening or a neutral oil will fry them. Butter in the dough will scorch at frying temperature.
- YieldA pound of meal makes roughly two dozen balls at this size, enough for six to eight as a side dish with pork, greens or a stew. They are best within minutes of coming out of the fat; reheat in a 375F oven rather than a microwave, which steams the crust soft.
"Pone" comes from an Algonquian word recorded by early English colonists in Virginia as apan or appone, meaning something baked, and it attached itself in American English to plain unleavened corn breads cooked on a griddle, in ashes, or in a spider. By the late nineteenth century corn pone was firmly associated with Southern and rural cooking, and its appearance in a professional hotel manual like this one may suggest something about how cheap corn meal preparations figured in commercial kitchens as inexpensive accompaniments and breakfast items, though the page alone is not evidence of that. What makes the page unusual is the essay Jessup Whitehead attaches to it: he uses corn meal as his example in a broader argument that the three-hour bakes given in printed directions, and in what is commonly said, exist only to cook the grain, and that a hotel cook should find the reason behind a long process and reach the same result faster. That reasoning is sound food science arrived at by observation, and it is why the recipe scalds the meal, adds the rest, and fries, rather than leaving a batter to sit in an oven.