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Corn Mush
Put four quarts fresh water in a kettle to boil, salt to suit the taste; when it begins to boil stir in one and one-half quarts meal, letting it sift through the fingers slowly to prevent lumps, adding it a little faster at the last, until as thick as can be conveniently stirred with one hand; set in the oven in the kettle (or take out into a pan), bake an hour, and it will be thoroughly cooked. It takes corn meal so long to cook thoroughly that it is very difficult to boil it until done without burning. Excellent for frying when cold. Use a hard wood paddle, two feet long, with a blade two inches a hard wood paddle, two feet long, with a blade two inches wide and seven inches long, to stir with. The thorough cooking and baking in oven afterwards, takes away all the raw taste that mush is apt to have, and adds much to its sweetness and delicious flavor. - Miss A. W.
S., Nashville, Tenn. وو ALABAMA "HOE CAKE."
One pint corn-meal, one-half table-spoonful salt, and cold water to make a stiff batter; beat well; sprinkle a hot griddle with meal, make a stiff batter; beat well; sprinkle a hot griddle with meal, let brown; then spread "hoe cake" half an inch thick, let brown on both sides. Good for dyspeptics. - Mrs. Sperry, Nashville, Tenn.
Two related cornmeal recipes run together here, and the transcription repeats a few lines where the original type was set twice. The mush is a large batch built on a ratio worth remembering: four parts water to one and a half parts meal by volume.
- Scale it downFour quarts of water and a quart and a half of meal yields roughly 12 to 16 servings, enough to fill a large stockpot. A quarter batch — 4 cups water, 1 1/2 cups cornmeal — suits a household and still slices well when cold.
- "Meal" means cornmealStone-ground yellow or white cornmeal, medium grind, behaves closest to what this book assumes. Modern degerminated supermarket meal cooks faster and tastes flatter; instant or self-rising cornmeal will not work here.
- The hinge: sift it in slowlyAdding the meal in a thin stream through the fingers into water at a bare boil is what prevents lumps. Dumping it in gives you a lump of paste with raw meal at the centre, and no amount of oven time fixes that.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe was written for a wood range. A moderate oven, around 350F, for the hour specified is a reasonable modern stand-in. The recipe does not say to cover the vessel, but covering will keep the surface from crusting and drying.
- Why the oven at allThe claim about raw taste is sound. Cornmeal starch needs prolonged hydration and heat to lose its chalky edge, and long unattended boiling scorches the bottom. Steady oven heat finishes the cooking without scraping and stirring.
- The paddleThe recipe specifies a hardwood paddle two feet long with a blade two inches wide and seven inches long. A long-handled wooden spoon or a flat-edged wooden spatula does the same job in a modern pot - the flat edge matters more than the length, since it keeps meal from setting on the bottom.
- Frying the cold mushPour the finished mush into a loaf pan, chill until firm - several hours or overnight - then turn out and cut into slabs half an inch thick. Fry in bacon fat or butter over medium-high heat until a crust forms, about 4 minutes a side.
- The hoe cakeOne pint of cornmeal with half a tablespoon of salt and cold water makes a very stiff batter, closer to a dough. Spread it half an inch thick on a hot, meal-dusted griddle over medium heat and give it 6 to 8 minutes a side; it browns slowly and needs a wide spatula to turn.
Cornmeal mush was the everyday grain dish of American households well before wheat flour was cheap, and the two-stage method here — boil, then bake — reflects a period when cooks were fighting a wood fire rather than setting a dial. The name "hoe cake" is generally traced to the practice of baking cornmeal dough on a flat iron implement over coals, though whether that was a field hoe or simply a broad griddle blade has been argued for two centuries. The Dixie Cook Book collects both recipes with contributors' names and towns attached, a common late nineteenth-century format that made a printed cookbook function as a neighbourhood exchange; the aside that hoe cake is "good for dyspeptics" reflects one strand of a divided nineteenth-century debate about corn and digestion, in which other writers held corn to be the harder of the two to digest.