Oatmeal Mush

One cup of B. B. oatmeal, and one teaspoonful of salt, to a scant quart of boiling water. Put the meal and salt in the top of the double boiler; add the boiling water. Place the upper boiler on the stove, and boil rapidly eight or ten minutes, stirring occasionally with a fork. Then place it over the hot water, and cook from forty to sixty minutes if liked dry, from two to three hours if liked very soft. Remove the cover just before serving, and stir with a fork to let the steam escape, to dry it off. Served with baked apples and sugar and cream.

Oatmeal comes in three grades. B. B. is the whole oat with the outer husk removed. It is less pasty than the finer grades. The Scotch consider the coarse oatmeal the best, the finer kinds being only suitable for children and invalids.

Oatmeal, rice, or any mush that contains much starch, is more easily digested if it is masticated, and mixed with the saliva. When eaten as a soft porridge and still further thinned with milk, if it be swallowed whole, the saliva has no chance to do its part, and the whole process of the digestion of the starch is left for the intestines. The meal should be thoroughly cooked, stiff, and dry, rather than thin.

Hominy, cracked wheat, and granulated wheat are cooked in the same way, using only three cups of boiling water instead of one quart.

The cracked wheat may be poured into a mould wet with cold water, and when jellied eaten cold with sugar and cream.

Whole wheat requires five cups of boiling water to one cup of wheat, and should cook six hours.

Hasty Pudding, Or Indian Meal Mush

Put one quart of water on to boil. Mix one pint of corn meal, one teaspoonful of salt, and one tablespoonful of flour with one pint of cold milk. Stir this gradually into the boiling water and boil half an hour, stirring often. Eat it hot, with milk, and only in cold winter weather.

Fried Hasty Pudding

Book as above and pour it into a brickloaf pan; when cool, cut into three-quarter inch slices. Dip them in flour, and brown each side in hot fat in a frying-pan. Or dip in crumbs, egg, and again in crumbs, and fry in deep fat.

Any of these mushes may be fried the same way. When eaten with bacon, they make a nice relish for breakfast.