Finally got some workshop time and had another go at this. Thanks for the link, which seemed to explain what grub is about.
It all seemed to make some semblance of sense. However, mcedit doesn't seem to exist in this Mint setup. Mr Howtogeek suggested "gksu gedit /etc/default/grub" but it didn't like gksu. This wasn't going well.
I managed to open, save and edit /etc/default/grub correctly using nano, checking that it had indeed saved the changes OK.
But now I can't run sudo update-grub, as it can't find the /cow directory(!).
I get the feeling this may be something to do with running from the live install, possibly some sort of Catch-22 situation. Perhaps the new SSD isn't mounted. Until I reboot and run from the installed system, perhaps I can't run update-grub. Yet I can't get back into the installed system until I've edited the intel_idle entry into grub. When I press e during the boot sequence, I get the grub screen generated during the install, not the original, simpler one. Ooof.
When I look up the error message, we get into some pretty heavy stuff. I have no real understanding of what I'm doing.