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To Fry Mush Without Eggs
Mix flour and water together to make thickening of the consistency of cream, without lumps. Roll the pieces of mush in it instead of egg and water, then in cracker meal, or bread crumbs, and fry in the usual way. A half cup of water or milk to two heaping tablespoonfuls of flour makes it. Milk gives the better color. The frying grease has to be hotter and fewer pieces must be put in at once to make this way nearly as good as the other. It answers very well, also, to roll the mush in rich milk without flour.
A workaround for coating fried cornmeal mush when eggs are short or expensive. The whole trick is fat temperature: a flour slurry sets more slowly than egg, so it needs a hotter pan and an uncrowded one.
- What mush isCornmeal cooked with water and salt into a stiff porridge, cooled until firm and cut into slices. The recipe assumes you already have it set and specifies neither pan, thickness nor timing; cold, fully firm slices hold together where warm ones will not.
- The batterHalf a cup of liquid to two heaping tablespoons of flour is roughly 120 ml to something like 25-30 g of flour, as stated. Whisk the flour into a little of the liquid first to avoid lumps, then thin with the rest.
- Milk over waterThe recipe is right that milk gives better color. Milk sugars and proteins brown where a plain flour-and-water paste stays pale and can taste raw.
- Cracker mealFinely crushed dry soda crackers, close to what is sold today as cracker meal or matzo meal. Panko is coarser and will behave differently; plain dry breadcrumbs, which the recipe also allows, are the nearest match.
- Hotter grease, fewer piecesThe recipe asks only for hotter fat and fewer pieces at once, without naming a temperature. Use a shallow layer of fat hot enough to set the coating immediately, and fry in batches with space around each slice, since crowding cools the fat.
- The milk-only versionDipping the mush in rich milk with no flour, as the last line suggests, will give a thinner coating. Pressing the crumbs on firmly and putting the slices straight into the fat should help it hold.
- Yield and servingServing -- The recipe gives no yield. Fried mush was eaten hot with butter, syrup, molasses or gravy, most often at breakfast.
Fried mush belongs to the long American career of cornmeal, which fed households cheaply from the colonial period onward: boiled soft as porridge one day, set firm and fried in fat the next, so that nothing was wasted. This particular entry is not really about the mush at all but about doing without eggs, and that is what makes it worth reading — a manual explaining, matter-of-factly, how to substitute a flour-and-milk slurry for the standard egg wash. Eggs were seasonal and their price rose sharply in winter. The frank admission that the result is only "nearly as good as the other" is what gives the entry its character.