Nebraskaland

50 Nebraskaland • July 2022 MIXED BAG My days of backpacking or putting together a carefully controlled inventory of supplies for a couple of days on a Nebraska river are pretty much over now that I'm 84 years old. But that doesn't mean I don't still enjoy camp food made over an open fire, just like the old days. In fact, in my cuisine, one of the most important ingredients is fire, complete with smoke and ashes. Another absolute necessity for camp cookery is cornmeal or polenta (once an Italian dish of various grain or nut meals but now understood and marketed as a slightly coarser cornmeal), which is low weight, easily stored and wonderfully versatile. I suppose it's obvious that freshly- caught catfish benefits from being rolled in and coated with cornmeal before frying, but less appreciated is the convenience and versatility of cornmeal dishes served with morning coffee. Nothing is easier or quicker than a batch of cornmeal mush whipped up for breakfast. Oh, I can hear the swoosh of noses being turned up. "Eeeuuuw! Mush!" Some foods suffer from poor branding. Corn smut, the ugly, blueish globs that sometimes blemish garden corn is much tastier and a lot more expensive when it is served in a fancy restaurant as "cuitlacoche" or "maize mushroom." The only three-star restaurant where I've eaten was in England, and the meal came with a vegetable delicacy known as oyster plant, which I quickly identified as plain old Meadow salsify, as common in Nebraska as dandelions. Maybe all we need to do is relabel mush with a fancy name, something like "maize al Italiano" or "polenta sur le feu." Thing is, mush is even within my modest cooking skills. A half cup of cornmeal, a half cup of water, and if you really want to get fancy, a dash of salt and/or sugar, and there you are. Boil the water, stir in the cornmeal, keep stirring over heat for three or four minutes until the mixture starts to get firm, and you have breakfast. But cornmeal doesn't have to be just cornmeal. Throw in a handful of mulberries, nuts, white oak acorns, raisins or morels. Add some honey or maple syrup, maybe some sweetening from the juice of the cut wild grapevine or dripping from the end of a broken maple branch in early spring. Elderflowers or berries, sand cherries, wild grapes, or gooseberries, and now you're talking gooooorMET! S e t w h a teve r "polenta sur le feu" is left aside a bit longer and it becomes the Johnny Cake — fried, grilled or eaten cold. Sliced and thrown into a pan with a little bacon grease or butter and you have the stuff of a second breakfast or early lunch. In fact, those early morning plans to load up and move on might just as well be set aside for a while. Might as well wait until the sun dries the gear of the morning dew before setting off. In fact, why not bait the set lines, pick some more mulberries, and enjoy this camp one more night while the eatin's good. Roger Welsch is an author, humorist, folklorist and a former essayist for CBS News Sunday Morning. He is the author of more than 40 books and has been contributing to NEBRASKAland Magazine since 1977. GETTING ALL MUSHY ABOUT MUSH, JOHNNY By Roger Welsch

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