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Corn Mush, Baked
Put into a kettle four quarts of water and salt to taste. When it begins to boil stir in one and one-half quart of meal, letting it sift slowly through the fingers to crush all lumps; add a little faster towards the last until as thick as can be conveniently stirred with one hand. Now set the kettle in the oven (or put the mush in a pan) and bake one hour; it will then be thoroughly cooked.
Baking is better than boiling for mush, as it takes corn meal a long time to cook and it burns very easily when boiling. The baking removes all the raw taste sometimes evident in mush and adds greatly to its excellence of flavor.
A plain cornmeal mush finished in the oven rather than on the burner, which is the whole point of the recipe. The quantities are for a large household.
- Scale it downFour quarts of water to a quart and a half of meal (about 6 cups, roughly 2 lb) makes something close to a gallon of mush, likely enough for a dozen or more servings. A quarter batch — 1 quart water to 1 1/2 cups cornmeal — is a sensible household amount.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, for the stated hour is a reasonable modern reading; the meal has already begun to thicken on the stovetop and the oven is finishing the starch and driving off the raw flavor.
- The vessel"Set the kettle in the oven" implies a pot that will go from range to oven; the recipe also allows transferring the mush to a pan. Any heavy ovenproof pot or a deep buttered baking dish works; avoid thin pans, where the bottom scorches before the center is cooked.
- Sifting through the fingersThis is the hinge. Adding the meal in a slow stream through the fingers, while stirring, is what prevents lumps — dumping it in gives you seized pockets of dry meal that no amount of baking will fix. A whisk in the other hand helps.
- The meal itselfUse stone-ground yellow or white cornmeal, not degerminated fine-grind, and not corn flour. Instant or quick polenta defeats the recipe: the long cooking time the author is working around is exactly what coarse meal needs.
- Cover or notUncovered, the top forms a skin and a crust. If you want it uniformly soft for serving with milk and molasses, cover the pot loosely; leave it open if the mush is destined to be chilled, sliced and fried.
- Salt"Salt to taste" before the meal goes in, and be more generous than instinct suggests — about 1 1/2 teaspoons per quart of water. Unsalted mush cannot be rescued afterward.
- Serving and keepingHot, it is a breakfast porridge with butter, cream, maple syrup or molasses. Poured into a loaf pan and chilled it sets firm enough to slice half an inch thick and fry in butter or bacon fat, a common way of using up leftover mush.
Cornmeal mush was, by the nineteenth century, a fixture of American breakfast tables, and appears under other names as well, notably hasty pudding. Butterick's insistence that baking beats boiling reflects the practical reality of the coal or wood range: mush needs long, gentle heat to lose its raw starchy taste, and on a direct fire it scorches on the bottom while the cook stands over it stirring. The oven of a kitchen range gave surrounding heat that a stovetop could not, and the same logic survives in the modern habit of finishing polenta in the oven or a slow cooker. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, also issued domestic manuals aimed at the home housekeeper, and the emphasis on thorough cooking of a cheap bulk grain is characteristic of the period's economical breakfast advice.