Mush Sautes
Sautes is sauteed, in meaning, according to English terminations, and that means fried in a common frying-pan like fried eggs, etc. The French or proper frying requires a quantity of hot fat or oil, as indicated in the preceding directions for fried mush.
The word Sautes is perpetually appearing in hotel bills of fare, but the people to whom it conveys any meaning are extremely few. It seems to be usually guessed to mean sauce. As it is a technical term, a person might read French a long time without meeting with it elsewhere than at table. There is sufficient reason for its use, seeing that no other word expresses the same thing correctly.
To saute mush, cut it in slices not over half an inch thick, and flour them all over. Place a spoonful of lard, clarified butter or clarified meat fat, in the frying pan, and when hot put in two or three slices, not near enough to touch. Brown it quickly, and turn over with an egg slice. Is only good when fried as wanted and served immediately.
There is still another variety of mush, and whether we make use of the knowledge or not, the necessity of at least being posted on them all was well exemplified in the luck of a certain man from Boston. He came from one of the best hotels of that city, and obtained a good position in St. Louis. What he claimed to have been, or what he had been in the famous Boston house, is neither here nor there, but it was evident that his had been only one particular line of duty, for, unexcelled in some things, there were other smaller matters that baffled his efforts, and one of these was fried mush. He knew of but one kind, and that was fried mush balls, which, you see, was a great misfortune, considering that he was head cook of a large hotel, having assistants who did not think it best to do otherwise than as he directed. So mush balls they made and made them good, very likely, or else the demand was small and the style unnoticed, for that way lasted quite a while. But presently evil days came, and brought with them some people of grand import, who had been boarding at the Hotel Terrible, up the avenue. They came in a huff, and soon began to sniff, and looking about for inferiorities, observed the fried mush balls. Then they pulled them apart, analyzed them, condemned them. If there was anything they did love, it was good fried mush; but these mush balls were simply atrocious. They demanded what they were pleased to term the genuine article. But they might as well have called spirits from the vasty deep, that would not come when they did call them, for neither they themselves nor anybody else could tell what difference of process was required. So dissatisfaction grew up on both sides. It took an earth-quake to "roll" the cooks out of their kitchens at Pompeii, and required an eruption of Vesuvius to make the bakers forget their bread in their ovens at Herculaneum, but that was in grander times than these, and it is not exceeding the truth to say that this sad fugitive from the modern Athens was impelled to sever his connection through no greater reason than the vacuity of his perceptions of the inherent possibilities of fried mush. Perhaps you think that after he was gone all was peace, and joy, and love, but it was not. His successor's mush was orthodox and irreproachable, but-- Well, there were some old habitues who had conceived an affection for the other kind, they did not know what made the difference, but there was a solid sweetness in the other that the new kind did not possess. The new cook did not understand it either, for he only knew one way; so they split the slices and double breaded them, and tried to make believe, and worried along, and I think they are all dead by this time and out of their troubles, but if ever you get into such a place after learning the following receipt, you will know what they want, better than they know themselves.
Beneath the digression about the unlucky Boston cook there is a complete method: firm cornmeal mush, sliced, floured, and pan-fried in a little fat. A few terms and assumptions need translating.
- The hinge: the mush must be cold and firmThis recipe presumes you already have a pan of cooked cornmeal mush poured into a loaf pan or shallow dish and left until set — several hours in the refrigerator, ideally overnight. Warm or soft mush will slump in the flour and break apart the moment you try to turn it.
- MushCornmeal (what earlier books call Indian meal) simmered in salted water until very thick, then chilled to a sliceable block. Coarse or medium grind gives the best texture; instant polenta sets softer and is harder to handle.
- Sauté versus deep-fryingSauté is the word at issue. The author's whole point is that this is shallow pan-frying in a spoonful of fat, not the "French or proper frying" of the preceding recipe, which submerges the slices. Both were loosely called frying in American kitchens of the period, hence the lecture.
- Egg sliceA thin, broad, flexible turner — a fish spatula does the job. Slide it fully under the slice before lifting; floured mush releases only when the crust has set.
- Clarified butter or clarified meat fatClarified butter and rendered beef or pork drippings both tolerate the heat needed here without smoking or burning solids. Lard, which the recipe names first, and refined oils serve as well; whole butter will brown too fast.
- Not near enough to touchTwo or three slices at a time in a 10-inch skillet. Crowding drops the pan temperature and the slices steam instead of crusting — the flour coating then sticks to the pan rather than the mush.
- Heat and timingMedium-high, roughly 3 to 4 minutes a side until deep gold. The mush is already cooked; you are only building a crust, so "brown it quickly" is literal.
- ServingThe instruction to fry only as wanted is sound — the crust softens within minutes. The recipe gives no quantities; a standard loaf-pan block cut in half-inch slices would give roughly 12 to 16 pieces. Fried mush was commonly eaten at breakfast with butter, molasses, or maple syrup, or alongside sausage.
Fried mush was one of the most ordinary things in the nineteenth-century American kitchen — a way of using yesterday's cornmeal porridge, cousin to fried polenta in Italy and to the sliced-and-fried scrapple of Pennsylvania. Jessup Whitehead wrote for hotel and restaurant cooks in the 1880s and 1890s, and his books are full of this mix of terse instruction and shop-floor anecdote; the story here is really a complaint about specialists who could execute grand dishes but had never learned the plain ones the paying regulars actually asked for. The lecture on sauté French when French when reflects a period when French menu French had spread through American hotels far faster than any understanding of it, and the "solid sweetness" the old habitués missed is worth noting, though what exactly the phrase described is left unexplained.