How to Make Mush

The inspiration for this post is an exchange I had with a friend a few years ago. After stammering out my response to the question, “What do you like to cook?”—one of those questions with the power to make my mind go completely blank—I asked her the same question. She said, without a pause and with a self confidence I covet to this day, “I mostly make mush”.

Of course I mocked her for it at the time. In my recollection, the only reason she cooked at all was to avoid literally being a starving artist. Sometimes she had to engage in that bothersome chore of sustaining her body so it would keep drawing for her. As someone who has always loved food and has been known to call a meal “life-changing”, it was ludicrous to me that someone who claimed to be creative and have good taste would so unabashedly admit to eating the culinary equivalent of a blob of clay.

Lately I’ve come to see the value in mush though.

“Mush” refers to a consistency (or state of mind) more than to a category of food really, although there are well known mushes. Any porridge and the goopier stews. Certainly “mush” evokes viscosity, near homogeneity, and a characteristic sound when a spoonful is dropped back into the bowl from 6 inches up.

You’d be right to suspect I don’t have clear-cut mush-making steps. It’s a much too personal journey. I can only make a case for why to make mush. But I trust the questions are wrapped up in each other enough that some of the how will be answered along the way.

Last year, I received the cookbook Salt Fat Acid Heat for Christmas. The central conceit is that once you become familiar with those four fundamentals of cooking, you become more free in the kitchen. It’s easier to make any recipe taste good and easier to improvise. And yet, since reading it cover-to-cover back then, it’s stayed open to the final fifth where it has recipes like any other cookbook which I follow to the letter (unless I forget to buy an ingredient and decide that it’s probably not that important).

The thing is, it’s actually hard to improvise when you have a recipe right there. I find myself constantly checking and rechecking the amounts and steps (with the exception of salt which I do taste and adjust). When you’re following a recipe, you have a clear picture (sometimes literally) of what you’re aiming for, and it’s not obvious how messing up different steps will affect the final vision. For instance, chicken pot pie mistakes could lead to a burnt crust, a soggy bottom, or more peas than you wanted. If you don’t know the territory, all you can do is follow the recipe religiously.

Most cooking in itself is not that hard. A lot of techniques and recipes are forgiving and have surprisingly wide margins for error. The hardest part about learning to cook is multitasking: to cook and read instructions simultaneously. It would be like learning to play piano and sightread at the same time or like learning to drive and read a map. You know a wrong turn is wrong, but how wrong is it exactly?

Enter mush. Mush is the culinary empty parking lot. You can’t get lost if you’re already where you want to be. It is possible to leave, but you have to try to do it.

Once you have mush, it pretty much stays mush no matter what. The mush becomes the canvas for your experimentation. Not sure how strong a new spice blend is? Keep adding until it tastes good. Wrong consistency? Add a little water or cook some off. Don’t we have blue cheese in the fridge? Sure, that could work. Afraid the kale you bought so ambitiously is going wilty? Mush! You’ll find that when you eliminate the need for reading and measuring things, you can use that extra time to laugh maniacally at your creation. Whenever you’re hungry or tired of cooking, you can stop and it’s ready to eat.

Need instructions to get to the parking lot? Flip to the Mush chapter in most cookbooks, and you’ll see they usually start with simmering a bean or grain in salted water until tender. What they don’t tell you is that almost all foods get tender when you stick them in hot water.