Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Mush
Mush
Indian or oatmeal mush is best made in the following manner: Put fresh water in a kettle over the fire to boil, and put in some salt; when the water boils, stir in handful by handful corn or oatmeal until thick enough for use. In order to have excellent mush, the meal should be allowed to cook well, and long as possible while thin, and before the final handful is added. When desired to be fried for breakfast, turn into an earthen dish and set away to cool. Then cut in slices when you wish to fry; dip each piece in beaten eggs and fry on a hot griddle.
A workable cornmeal or oatmeal porridge, with the classic second life as fried mush. The recipe's own emphasis is the right one: cook it long while it is still thin.
- Indian meal"Indian" meal is cornmeal, and in a 19th-century American kitchen it was typically stone-ground and coarser than modern meal. Medium or coarse cornmeal gives the texture intended; fine degerminated meal sets up faster and blander. "Oatmeal" at this date would usually mean cut or coarse-ground oats rather than rolled flakes.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. Roughly 1 cup cornmeal to 4 cups water with 1 teaspoon salt makes a mush thick enough to slice when cold; use 5 cups water if you want it loose for eating hot with milk.
- The hingeCook it long while thin, exactly as written. Cornmeal starch needs sustained heat to hydrate fully — 30 to 45 minutes at a bare simmer — and meal added at the end only thickens without ever losing its raw, gritty taste.
- Adding the mealHandful by handful into boiling water is the technique that prevents lumps, but it needs constant stirring with the other hand. Mush spits as it thickens; a long spoon and low heat once it starts to bubble heavily are worth the trouble.
- The earthen dishAny straight-sided vessel works — a loaf pan is the modern equivalent and gives slices of a convenient size. Chill it thoroughly, at least four hours and preferably overnight, or the slices will slump on the griddle.
- FryingSlices about half an inch thick, dipped in beaten egg, want a well-greased griddle at medium heat and five or six minutes a side. Rushing them on high heat browns the egg before the interior warms through.
- YieldThe quantities above serve four as hot porridge, or make roughly a dozen fried slices for two to three at breakfast.
Mush is the plainest expression of what corn meant to American households: cheap, filling, and endlessly stretchable. The name is English and is generally traced to a variant of "mash," describing the texture, but the dish itself descends from Native American preparations of ground maize that colonists adopted almost immediately, which is why the grain is called "Indian" meal in nineteenth-century cookbooks. The two-stage method here — cook it one day, fry it the next morning — is the frugality that made it a fixture rather than the taste.