Fried Mushes
Mush left over from breakfast may be packed in greased, one pound baking-powder box, and covered, which will prevent crust from forming. The next morning remove from box, slice thinly, dip in flour, and sauté. Serve with maple syrup.
Fried Corn Meal Mush, or Fried Hominy Pack corn meal or hominy mush in greased, one pound baking-powder boxes, or small bread pan, cool, and cover. Cut in thin slices, and sauté; cook slowly, if preferred crisp and dry. Where mushes are cooked to fry, use less water in steaming. 1 cup rice
A thrift dish built on the assumption that a pot of mush was cooked every morning. The whole thing turns on getting the mush cold and firm enough to slice cleanly.
- The hinge: chill it hardMush will not slice or hold together unless it is thoroughly cold and set — overnight in the refrigerator, not an hour on the counter. Warm or damp mush disintegrates the moment it hits the pan.
- Less water, as the book saysThe closing instruction is the important one. Mush intended for frying should be cooked stiffer than mush for the breakfast bowl, using less water than you would for a soft porridge. The book gives no ratio.
- Baking-powder boxA one-pound baking powder tin was a straight-sided cylinder about 3 inches across, which gave neat round slices. A clean 15-oz can, a small loaf pan, or a quart container all work; grease it and cover the surface with plastic wrap in place of the lid.
- "Sauté"In this book sauté means shallow-frying in a thin layer of hot fat, not the modern dry-pan toss. Use bacon fat, butter, or oil about 1/8 inch deep in a heavy skillet.
- Slice thickness"Thinly" is optimistic — 1/2 inch is the practical minimum. Thinner slices break when turned. Dredge in flour, shake off the excess, and leave the slices alone until the underside has set into a crust, four to five minutes over medium heat.
- HominyHere hominy means cooked hominy grits, not the whole nixtamalized kernels sold canned. Coarse stone-ground grits give the best texture for frying.
- Slow for crispThe instruction to cook slowly if you want it crisp and dry is sound: a moderate heat drives off moisture while the surface browns. High heat colors the outside before the interior has firmed.
- The stray lineThe trailing "1 cup rice" belongs to the recipe that followed in the original book, not to this one. Ignore it.
- YieldA one-pound tin's worth of mush gives only a handful of slices at the thickness suggested above — two to three servings with syrup, or four alongside sausage and eggs.
Cornmeal mush descends directly from Native American preparations of ground maize, adopted by colonists early and kept on American breakfast tables for centuries under names that shifted by region — mush, hasty pudding, or simply cornmeal porridge. Frying the cold leftovers is the same economy that produced polenta fritta in northern Italy and, with pork scraps and spices added, Pennsylvania scrapple: a stiff grain porridge, once set, becomes a sliceable solid that browns beautifully. Its placement in the Cereals chapter reflects how Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School book treated grains as a daily staple with a second life, and the use of a baking-powder tin as a mold is a small piece of turn-of-the-century kitchen practice.