Home › The World's Kitchen › Cornmeal Mush
Cornmeal Mush
Half pint cold milk, half pint cold water, two saltspoons salt, one and a half gills cornmeal, one ounce powdered sugar and the peel of one sound lemon. Place all the above in an enamelled saucepan. Briskly stir with a wooden spoon all around till the flour is thoroughly thickened. Let slowly boil for twenty-five minutes and carefully stir at the bottom frequently to prevent burning. Remove the lemon peel and serve with cold cream or milk and sugar, separately.
A sweetened cornmeal porridge scented with lemon, closer to an Italian sweet polenta than to the plain breakfast mush of American farm cooking. The measurements are old but unambiguous, and the whole thing scales cleanly.
- The unitsHalf a pint is one cup, so you have a cup of milk and a cup of water. A gill is half a cup, making one and a half gills of cornmeal three-quarters of a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two is half a teaspoon.
- Start cold, and keep stirringThe hinge of the recipe is that everything goes into the pan cold and comes up to heat together. Cornmeal dropped into hot liquid seizes into lumps; brought up from cold with steady stirring it hydrates evenly and needs no whisk work later.
- Powdered sugarIn a book of this vintage powdered sugar means granulated sugar ground fine, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Ordinary granulated sugar is the right substitute; one ounce is about two tablespoons.
- The enamelled saucepanProbably specified because the acid of the lemon peel can react with bare copper, iron or aluminium, and milk can pick up off colours from unlined iron. Enamelled cast iron, stainless or a nonstick pan all work. Use the heaviest base you have, since the sugar and milk scorch readily.
- The lemon peelPare the zest in wide strips with a peeler and take no white pith, which turns bitter over twenty-five minutes of cooking. Fish the strips out before serving as directed; they will have gone soft and grey but will have given up everything they have.
- Cooking time and the meal you buyTwenty-five minutes at a bare simmer suits stone-ground meal. Degerminated supermarket cornmeal thickens faster and quick-cooking or instant polenta will be done in five, so judge by texture rather than the clock and add hot milk if it stiffens too soon.
- ConsistencyTwo cups of liquid to three-quarters of a cup of meal gives a stiff porridge that will set as it cools. Loosen with additional milk if you want it spoonable rather than sliceable.
- YieldTwo generous servings or three small ones. The cold cream or milk and sugar are served alongside, not stirred in, so each eater floods their own bowl.
Cornmeal mush is the plainest of American dishes, descended from the Native American practice of boiling ground maize into a porridge, and known through the colonial period and after as hasty pudding, samp or simply mush. What sets this version apart from a farmhouse one is the milk, sugar and lemon peel: those turn a savoury breakfast staple into a sweet dish that sits closer to Italian polenta dolce or to the lemon-scented milk puddings of French and Spanish kitchens. Cooking an aromatic in the liquid and lifting it out before serving is a technique also familiar from custard and rice pudding work.