Cornmeal mush and bacon

My mom used to make cornmeal mush for us for breakfast.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood not everyone had eaten cornmeal mush, or even heard of it before. You see, my mom spent the first part of her childhood in Pennsylvania, in Pennsylvania Dutch company. It’s an area of Southeastern and South Central Pennsylvania, populated before 1800 by German-speaking peoples. Pennsylvania Dutch was originally Pennsylvania Deutsch, you see. The area has its own colloquialisms and habits. In my family, we didn’t clear the dinner dishes. We redded off the table.

And we ate cornmeal mush, a simple combination of cornmeal, water, butter and salt, simmered the night before into a porridge, then chilled overnight in a casserole pan. In the morning, my mom sliced up the chilled porridge and fried it up on our electric skillet, smothered it in maple syrup, then handed it to us at the breakfast table.

I always loved it.

Danny had never eaten cornmeal mush before he met me. We make polenta all the time, which isn’t very different from the cornmeal porridge we made, so it wasn’t a leap for us to make our own. I fried it up for us one morning with good olive oil and a pinch of salt. Danny didn’t want syrup — silly man. So I took this picture of his relatively clean plate.

We did agree on one thing: bacon. This plate needed bacon.

I particularly love a thick, smoky slice of bacon dipped in maple syrup. With this breakfast, I got my wish.