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Cornmeal Mush
Three cupfuls of boiling water, one cupful of cornmeal, half cupful of cold water, one teaspoonful of salt, moisten the meal with the cold water and stir the mixture gradually into the boiling salted water. Cook thirty minutes, stirring; then move to the back of the stove and let simmer gently an hour. If the mush is to be used for frying, moisten the meal with cold milk instead of water, as it will brown easier. Turn it in a pan or mould that has been wet in cold water, and let cool.
Cut cold mush in slices a quarter of an inch thick, brown on a griddle well greased with clarified butter, or beef suet, and serve on a hot platter.
A sound method that still works, with two details worth noting: the cold-water slurry that prevents lumps, and the long slow cook that most modern recipes cut short.
- The hinge: slurry firstMoistening the meal with cold water before it meets the boiling pot is what keeps the mush lump-free. Add the slurry in a thin stream while stirring, and it will thicken without seizing.
- "Back of the stove"On a wood or coal range this was the cool zone, roughly a bare simmer. On a gas or electric hob use the lowest setting with a heat diffuser, or hold it in a 300F oven, covered, for the hour.
- Ninety minutes is not a misprintThe full cook hydrates the starch completely and drives off the raw, chalky taste of the meal. Cutting it short gives a mush that tastes green.
- Cornmeal grindThis assumes a medium stone-ground yellow or white meal, not the fine degerminated cornmeal now sold as a baking ingredient. Fine meal will thicken faster and needs a little more water; coarse polenta grind needs a little more time.
- Proportions and yieldThree and a half cups of liquid to one cup of meal gives a mush stiff enough to slice cold. It fills a small loaf pan and serves three or four.
- Wetting the mouldRinsing the pan in cold water and not drying it stops the mush sticking, so the cold loaf turns out whole. A loaf tin lined with plastic film does the same job.
- Clarified butter or suetBoth take a hard browning heat without burning. Any high-smoke-point fat works; ordinary butter will scorch before the slices crust.
- Chill it properlyOvernight in the refrigerator, not a few hours at room temperature. Fully cold mush slices cleanly and holds together on the griddle; barely-set mush crumbles.
Boiled cornmeal is among the oldest continuously eaten dishes in North America, taken from Indigenous cooks by European settlers along with the grain itself, and it survives under a shelf of regional names: mush in the North and Midwest, hasty pudding in New England, grits and cornmeal porridge in the South, polenta in the Italian kitchens that arrived with later immigration. It belongs to a household economy where the same pot did double duty: hot and soft with milk and molasses one morning, then set, sliced and fried in suet the next, so that nothing was wasted. The note about moistening with milk rather than water when the mush is destined for the griddle is a genuinely practical observation, since milk sugars and protein brown far more readily than starch alone.