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Cornmeal Circles
Do not allow left-over cornmeal mush to get perfectly cold before molding it. Beat it well, so that it will be perfectly smooth, and pour it into bakingpowder tins, or half an inch deep in a flat pan, first moistening the tin with cold water. When ready to use cut in circles half an inch thick. If molded in a flat sheet use a biscuit cutter. Roll in milk, then very lightly in flour. Heat a little butter or bacon fat on a baking-tin until it bubbles, lay the circles on this, and brown lightly in a very hot oven. These make a good garnish for a meat dish, or may be served with maple syrup for breakfast or lunch.
A thrifty way to use yesterday's cornmeal mush, and the technique still works. The whole thing hinges on molding the mush while it is warm and pliable.
- Mold it warmCold mush will not smooth out or fill a mold cleanly. Beat it while it is still warm enough to pour, then leave it in the mold until firm.
- Baking-powder tinsOld baking-powder tins were straight-sided cans, roughly two to three inches across depending on size, used here as molds so the mush could be sliced into rounds. Any small can, a wide-mouth jar, or a straight-sided glass works; so does the flat-pan-and-biscuit-cutter method the recipe offers as an alternative.
- "Very hot oven"Read that as 450–475F. The fat must be hot and bubbling before the rounds go in, or they will stick and steam rather than crust.
- Wet the moldMoistening the tin with cold water is what lets the set mush slide out in one piece. Do not skip it.
- Milk-then-flour coatingThe milk dip makes a very light flour coating adhere. Keep the flour thin — a heavy dredge turns gummy against the moist interior.
- Half an inch, not thinnerThinner slices slump and break when turned. Half an inch holds its shape and gives you a crisp shell over a soft center.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantity; you will get as many rounds as your leftover mush allows. Serve immediately; they soften as they sit.
Cornmeal mush was a staple of American breakfast tables through the nineteenth century, and slicing the cooled leftovers to fry was an ordinary practice — it is the same thrift that produced fried polenta in northern Italy and scrapple in Pennsylvania, where the cooled cornmeal loaf carries pork trimmings as well. What is characteristic of this book is the framing: rather than treating fried mush as a dish in its own right, it recasts the leftovers as neat cut circles fit to ring a meat platter. Left-over cookery books flourished in the early twentieth century, and their appeal was as much about presentation as economy.