Fried Mush

A while back, a few of my friends and I were talking about different food dishes we’ve eaten that aren’t all that common – at least to us. Mush was my contribution to the conversation. I could not really tell them what mush is, other than fried cornmeal, but even if that is all it is, it would probably still be good.

Through the magic of Google, I found out that mush really is pretty much just fried cornmeal (mixed with water and salt), but somehow, it’s mushy inside. Check out this post on a blog called “the frugal girl” for a picture and the recipe.

One of my grandmas was from the south. Mush was one of the many things from her heritage she treated us to. She would drag out her fry daddy, fill it with grease of some sort, and drop pieces of uncooked mush into the gurgling abyss. It hissed in pleasure and made our mouths water. One of my sisters and I could hardly wait for her to dip out the mush and set it on the table.

“It’s hot!” she would say. “Be careful.”

So, we would use the sort of bite in which you use your teeth but you move your lips out of the way. If you ever saw the episode of Friends from Season Seven called "The One With The Engagement Picture" during which Chandler could not smile in front of a camera so he did a fake smile with his teeth showing, then you'll know what I'm talking about. Anyway, if it didn’t leave a third degree burn, we would wolf it down.

Milk was the drink of choice, but you had to be careful because Grandma preferred butter milk and that meant she thought you should prefer it too. So she would slip a glass in front of you if you weren’t looking just to see what type of reaction she could get as the clumps of gunk (what is that stuff, anyway?) present in butter milk slid down your throat. A nice tall glass of cold 2% milk was the perfect complement to the piping hot mush.

I miss those days.