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Swiss Mush
Place in an enamelled pan one pint milk, two gills water and three saltspoons salt, set on the fire, and as soon as it comes to a boil sprinkle in three ounces cornmeal flour; add one ounce good butter, sharply stir while adding, then let slowly cook for one and a half hours, being careful to stir very frequently to prevent burning at the bottom. Remove, drop mush in a deep dish, and serve with thick cream and powdered sugar separately.
A cornmeal porridge cooked long and slow, served as a sweet dish with cream. The measurements translate cleanly; the cooking method needs the most attention.
- The measurementsOne pint of milk is 2 cups; two gills is 1 cup of water. Three saltspoons is about 3/4 teaspoon salt, and one ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons.
- Cornmeal flour"Cornmeal flour" means finely ground cornmeal, closer to the fine grind sold for polenta than to coarse grits. Three ounces is roughly 2/3 cup by volume; weigh it if you can, since cornmeal volume varies a great deal with grind.
- Why enamelledThe instruction is not decorative. Bare cast iron or unlined copper will discolour a milk-based mush and can give it a metallic edge over ninety minutes; enamelled cast iron, stainless steel with a heavy base, or nonstick all work.
- The hinge: adding the mealSprinkle the cornmeal into boiling liquid in a thin stream while stirring hard. Dumping it in produces lumps that will not cook out no matter how long the pot sits on the heat.
- Ninety minutes is realLong, slow cooking is what makes this silky rather than gritty, but the milk sugars will scorch on the bottom. Keep the heat at a bare simmer, stir down to the base every few minutes, or set the pan over a pot of simmering water and stir less often.
- ConsistencyThe mush will thicken considerably over ninety minutes, and you may need to loosen it with a little more hot milk toward the end; the recipe does not call for this. It should still pour thickly from the spoon when it goes into the dish.
- Yield and servingEnough for about three to four as a breakfast or supper dish. 'Powdered sugar' in older cookbooks often meant sugar ground finer than granulated rather than modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch; the recipe directs that sugar and cream be passed separately rather than stirred in.
Cornmeal porridge under the name mush is the American term for a dish that runs across the Alps as polenta, and what the Swiss label in the title refers to is not established here. Maize reached southern Europe in the sixteenth century and took hold quickly in the Alpine valleys, where it displaced older porridges of chestnut, barley and buckwheat; the Italian-speaking cantons in particular built a cooking tradition on it. Mush was already so familiar in American kitchens that the only genuinely unfamiliar thing here is the cream and sugar.