The Great Depression Staple With Roots In Native American Cooking

The stock market crash of 1929 marked the beginning of the American Great Depression, an era of intense hardship that lasted for an entire decade. Gazing over the state of the country, President FDR was moved to remark, "I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." By 1933, the national unemployment rate hit 25% (for reference, during the 2020 pandemic, the civilian unemployment rate remained below 15%, per the BLS). For home cooks across the country, the era birthed a wave of culinary ingenuity. From Hoover stew to banana bread, the thrifty new dishes of the period emphasized minimal, often starchy ingredients such as potatoes, rice, and flour — versatile and filling. Innovative foodies were finding creative cooking techniques to transform staple ingredients — like cornmeal, a food steeped in flavor and American heritage. Fried cornmeal mush was eaten for eons by the Native American people, and remained a staple for struggling folks during the Great Depression.

Cornmeal mush is a kind of porridge not unlike polenta, consisting of cornmeal hydrated with water, then boiled, chilled, sliced, and fried. Indigenous Americans grew maize as a food source for both people and livestock, drying the corn kernels on the stalk to transform them into a more versatile ingredient. Fried, that same cornmeal mush sustained Americans during both the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. It was highly portable and shelf-stable, fit for migrating folks in crisis and scarcity-stricken folks at home alike.

To make Depression-era fried cornmeal mush, a mixture of yellow cornmeal, salt, and water is allowed to sit, as the cornmeal soaks up the water to thicken. Then, the mixture gets transferred into a pot of boiling water, stirring constantly to thicken even more, before being spread into a greased loaf pan. From there, the loaf pan is chilled to harden for several hours or overnight, then sliced into half-inch-thick, toothy strips and pan-fried in butter, oil, or lard.

Crispy, golden brown fried cornmeal mush sports a pancake-adjacent texture. During the Depression era, it was often enjoyed as breakfast, served with a generous drizzle of maple syrup. Fried cornmeal mush was also used as a thrifty way to use up any leftover porridge from the day before. If you own a cast-iron skillet, this centuries-old American dish is a great opportunity to bust it out.

Indeed, culinary ingenuity from whatever is available is an American skillset that traces back to the country's earliest people. Long before the Great Depression, cornmeal was a dietary staple of Native Americans across the nation. Further South, Mesoamericans have been cultivating maize for at least 8,000 years. The crop made its way from Peru to the Pueblo people of the American Southwest around 1200 B.C.E. The Cherokee and Iroquois peoples were growing corn by 1000 C.E. — thousands of years before Europeans dubbed the land "The New World."

In the great American novel "The Grapes of Wrath" (published in 1939 and written during the Depression), John Steinbeck wrote, "How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him." Americans were subjected to intense poverty and economic upheaval during the 1930s, and it is largely thanks to the nutritional knowledge of the earliest inhabitants of the land that people survived this era.

Native American foodies prepared corn via nixtamalization, a process by which dried corn kernels are soaked in alkaline limewater (aka calcium hydroxide) or cooked in ash. The word "nixtamal" itself comes from the indigenous Mexican Náhuatl words "nextli" (ashes) and "tamale" (corn dough). This process functionally alters the corn's chemical compounds, making the nutrients therein substantially more bioavailable. In fact, an ocean away in Italy, ignorance about nixtamalization led to a severe pellagra epidemic via polenta.

In the Native American culinary tradition, dried corn meal was commonly used to make ash-baked breads like atole and chicha. Many of the American Southern regional dishes that feature cornmeal are derived from dishes created by the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek tribes (think corn pone, Johnnycakes, and hush puppies). Fried cornmeal mush is nearly identical to Native American nokake (blue corn cakes), made from cornmeal, salt, and water, pan-fried to a crunch.