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Pudding (Milk cups cooked mush hot)
Milk 2 cups cooked mush (hot or cold) 1/2 cup sugar 1 small can shredded pineapple 1 egg Mix mush and pineapple and sugar, add egg well beaten; stir in enough milk to thin, as for rice pudding. Bake in oven about 20 minutes.
A thrift pudding built on leftover cornmeal mush, thinned with milk and sweetened with canned pineapple. The original assumes you know what rice pudding batter looks like, and it names neither the milk quantity nor the oven temperature.
- What "mush" meansIn American cookbooks of this period "mush" usually means cornmeal mush — yellow or white cornmeal simmered in salted water to a thick porridge, close to what an Italian kitchen would call polenta — though oatmeal and other grains were also cooked as mush. Roughly 1/2 cup dry cornmeal to 2 cups water gives about two cups. The recipe allows the mush either hot or cold; if it is cold and set solid, break it up with a fork before mixing.
- The milk is the whole judgement callNo amount is given because the mush varies. Add milk until the mixture pours thickly, like a loose rice pudding — roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups for two cups of stiff mush. Too thick and it bakes to a dense cake; too thin and it never sets around the cornmeal.
- Oven temperatureNone is stated. A moderate oven, 350F, suits a milk-and-egg pudding; anything hotter will curdle the custard at the edges before the middle warms through.
- Twenty minutes is optimisticA single egg in that much milk needs time. Expect 35 to 45 minutes in a buttered 1-quart dish before the centre is just set and no longer sloshes. Twenty minutes only works if the mush went in hot and the dish is shallow and wide.
- "Small can shredded pineapple"Shredded or grated pineapple has largely been replaced on shelves by crushed pineapple, which is the same thing for this purpose. A small tin of the period was commonly somewhere around 8 to 9 oz; drain it, or count the syrup as part of your liquid and cut the milk back.
- SugarHalf a cup is generous to modern taste, especially if the pineapple is packed in syrup and you do not drain it. Start with 1/3 cup and judge by taste.
- Yield and servingServes about four as written. It is plain enough to want something alongside, such as cream or a pudding sauce.
Cornmeal mush was a standard American breakfast well into the twentieth century, and mush puddings of this kind used up what was left in the pot: the grain was already cooked, so a pudding cost only an egg, some milk and sweetening. It sits close to the older family of baked cornmeal-and-milk puddings, with canned fruit in place of molasses. Canned Hawaiian pineapple became cheap and widely distributed in the first decades of the 1900s, and "shredded" or "grated" pineapple in small tins turns up frequently in community cookbooks of that era, dropped into salads, cakes and puddings as a mark of being up to date. Recipes like this one — cheap, forgiving, and assuming a pot of yesterday's mush in the cold pantry — were aimed squarely at inexperienced housekeepers.