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Corn Mush, Fried
Cut the cold mush into slices about one-fourth of an inch thick, and fry until brown and crisp in a very little fat; or sprinkle the slices with flour, and fry; or dip each slice first in salted beaten egg and then in bread or cracker crumbs, and fry brown. Fried mush is one of the most delicious of breakfast dishes when properly prepared. The fat should be very hot, so that a crust will quickly form upon the slices, preventing them from soaking up any grease. Hominy and other cereals may be fried in the same way.
A cold-leftover recipe that assumes you made cornmeal mush the day before and let it set firm in a loaf pan. Everything depends on the mush being fully chilled and the fat being hot before the slices go in.
- The mush itselfThe recipe assumes mush cooked earlier and left to go cold: cornmeal boiled thick with water and salt, then turned into a pan to set. It must be cold and stiff enough to slice cleanly.
- Slice thicknessA quarter inch is thin, and it suits the dish: thin slices crisp through before the interior turns to paste. Half an inch is workable but needs a slower, longer fry.
- "Very hot" fatThe book gives no temperature, only "very hot"; in modern terms a shallow layer of fat around frying heat, or a well-heated heavy pan brushed with fat. This is the hinge of the recipe: a cool pan lets the starch drink oil and the slices break apart when you turn them.
- Fat to useThe recipe specifies only "a very little fat"; bacon drippings or lard would have been ordinary choices and suit the dish. Butter alone will brown too fast at frying heat.
- Turn onceGive each side three to five minutes undisturbed. Mush releases from the pan only after a crust has formed, so early prodding is what causes the slices to tear.
- The flour and crumb variationsThe flour dredge gives a light shell; the egg-and-crumb coating makes something closer to a croquette and needs a slightly lower heat so the crumbs do not scorch before the center warms.
- Hominy and "other cereals"Cold cooked grits, oatmeal or rice, pressed into a pan and chilled, will slice and fry the same way.
Fried mush belongs to the long American habit of cooking cornmeal into a thick porridge, letting it set, and frying the remainder the next morning — the same logic behind Italian fried polenta and the scrapple of Pennsylvania German kitchens, which adds pork scraps to the same set-and-slice method. Cornmeal was by most accounts among the cheapest breakfast starches in nineteenth-century America, and mush is often said to have appeared on tables daily; frying the cold leftovers turned an economical dish into something a cookbook could call delicious without embarrassment. That the Butterick book, published by a pattern company for a broad readership around the turn of the century, includes it at all shows how firmly grain porridges still anchored the morning meal before packaged breakfast flakes took over.