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This tamale pie comes from a 1918 American cookbook written to help housekeepers use less wheat. It is cornmeal mush layered with a small amount of meat, onion, tomato and green pepper, then baked, so there is no flour and no pastry crust. In one dish you can see how the First World War changed home cooking: corn replaced wheat, a little meat went further than usual, and a Southwestern street-food idea got simplified into a weeknight casserole that the federal government approved of.
Please note that some of the images in this article were created with the assistance of AI.
From Foods That Will Win the War and How to Cook Them, 1918
About This Recipe
This tamale pie comes from Foods That Will Win the War and How to Cook Them, published in New York in 1918 by C. Houston Goudiss, publisher of The Forecast magazine, and his wife Alberta M. Goudiss, who directed the School of Modern Cookery that the couple founded. Every recipe in the book carried the endorsement of Herbert Hoover’s U.S. Food Administration, and this one sits in the ‘Save Wheat’ section, in a chapter called ‘The Use of Corn.’ Cornmeal mush takes the place of any flour or pastry, and two cups of meat are spread through the whole pan, following the book’s advice to use meat ‘for flavor’ and stretch it with cereals. Tamale pie itself was a fairly new American invention at the time, a layered, baked shortcut to the tamales that had become a common street food in the States by the 1890s.
C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss · page 19
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The Page, as Printed in 1918
C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss, Foods That Will Win the War and How to Cook Them (World Syndicate Company, New York, 1918), p. 19. Transcribed from the original scan.
The recipe · 1918
Tamale Pie
From Foods That Will Win the War and How to Cook Them by C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss (1918), page 19. Every word below is as printed.
Ingredients
- 2 cups cornmeal
- 5 cups water (boiling)
- 2 tablespoons fat
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 onion
- 2 cups tomatoes
- 2 cups cooked or raw meat cut in small pieces
- ¼ cup green peppers
Method
-
Cook the cornmeal mush
To the cornmeal and 1 teaspoon salt, add boiling water. Cook one-half hour.
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Brown the onion and add the meat
Brown onion in fat, add meat.
-
Season the meat
Add salt, ⅛ teaspoon cayenne, the tomatoes and green peppers.
-
Layer the mush and meat
Grease baking dish, put in layer of cornmeal mush, add seasoned meat, and cover with mush.
-
Bake
Bake one-half hour.
Source: C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss, Foods That Will Win the War and How to Cook Them (World Syndicate Company, New York, 1918), p. 19. View the original page (Internet Archive, scan from Wellcome Library).
The original recipe text and page scan are from a work published in 1918 and are in the public domain in the United States. The history and notes are Piaci Pizza’s own writing. Brand names that appear in historic recipes are mentioned as historical fact only. Illustrations are AI-generated in a vintage style. The recipe is shown exactly as it was published in 1918; we have not photographed a test batch.
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