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Save by Using Inexpensive Foods
These are some of the ways I feed my family on a small amount of money. They enjoy fried mush for breakfast and this is very inexpensive. I make the mush very thick and mold it in a breadpan. In the morning I turn it out and slice it and sauté it on both sides. We split the slices and butter them. I can serve four breakfasts for three people on ten cents' worth of corn-meal and a half pound of butter. Sometimes I add pork sausage to the mush and do not use butter. I fry the sausage, add a pint and a half of water and a cup of corn-meal. This is molded after it is cooked and is sautéd the same as plain mush. Left-over potatoes make excellent dumplings. I also make head-cheese. This is very inexpensive and delicious. -Mrs. C. M., St. Louis, Mo.
A reader's economy letter rather than a formal recipe, but the fried mush it describes is fully workable once a few proportions and modern equivalents are filled in.
- The hinge: cook the mush long and thickCornmeal needs 30 to 45 minutes of slow cooking with frequent stirring to hydrate fully and set firm enough to slice. Undercooked mush tastes raw and gritty and slumps when you turn it out of the pan.
- Proportions for the plain versionShe gives none. Three cups of water to one cup of cornmeal, with a teaspoon of salt, gives a mush stiff enough to mold; four to one gives a soft porridge that will not slice cleanly. Her sausage version -- a pint and a half of water to a cup of meal -- is that same three-to-one ratio.
- Corn-meal has changedNearly all supermarket cornmeal is degerminated and finer than the stone-ground meal of the period. It cooks faster and tastes blander; stone-ground yellow meal is closer to what she had, but check the package for grind and add liquid if it thickens too fast.
- "Breadpan" and chillingAn ordinary loaf tin, about 9 by 5 inches. Pour the hot mush in, smooth the top and refrigerate at least four hours, ideally overnight -- she means it to set cold and firm, which is why it slices.
- Sauté means fry in fat, and it means dry slicesCut half-inch slices, blot them, and cook in butter, bacon fat or oil over medium heat without moving them until a crust forms, roughly five minutes a side. Wet slices steam and stick.
- A half pound of butterTwo sticks, split across four breakfasts for three people. That is generous by modern habit; the butter here is doing the work of both the frying fat and the topping.
- Head-cheeseShe names it but gives no method. It is a set terrine of simmered pig's head meat in its own gelatin, and it is a separate project that needs a current recipe with temperatures and timings, not a passing mention.
- YieldA loaf pan of mush cut into half-inch slices gives roughly sixteen to eighteen slices; enough for three or four people at a breakfast, more if it accompanies eggs. She claims four breakfasts for three people from ten cents' worth of meal, which implies more than one batch.
Fried mush is one of the plainest survivals of the cornmeal cookery that was a staple in much of the country, especially the South and the frontier: boiled meal, set overnight, sliced and fried in the morning so that nothing was wasted and one pot did two meals. The sausage version she describes is essentially scrapple without the offal or the buckwheat, a dish generally traced to Pennsylvania German households and their habit of extending scraps of pork with grain. This page belongs to a familiar genre -- letters from readers, identified only by initials and city, offering household economies. The ten cents' worth of corn-meal dates it as firmly as anything else in the volume, and the underlying logic, that a cheap grain plus a little fat can carry a family through several breakfasts, is older than any of the cookbooks that print it.