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Corn Pone
Mix thoroughly five teacupfuls of corn-meal, two of Graham flour, one of New Orleans molasses, and two teaspoonfuls of soda with one quart of buttermilk. Put in a tin or porcelain kettle, buttered, and flaring at the top; fasten the top securely, plunge into another kettle so it is submerged, fill with boiling water and boil hard for six hours; then slip it from the kettle to a pan and bake slowly for two hours.
This is a steamed-then-baked loaf in the Boston brown bread family rather than the skillet corn pone of Southern cooking, and it asks for eight hours of total cooking. Read the whole method before starting so the water bath is set up properly.
- TeacupfulA teacup in turn-of-the-century American books is smaller than a modern measuring cup, generally reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though usage varied and the original is genuinely imprecise. Working at 3/4 cup gives roughly 3 3/4 cups cornmeal, 1 1/2 cups Graham flour and 3/4 cup molasses to the quart of buttermilk.
- The hinge: the mold must stay submergedSix hours of hard boiling will drop the water level well below the top of the mold unless you top it up. Keep a kettle of boiling water going and add it as needed so the batter is surrounded by water the whole time; a mold that breaks the surface bakes on one side and stays raw in the middle.
- Fasten the top, but leave roomFill the buttered mold no more than two-thirds and tie or clip the lid down. Soda-raised batter climbs as it steams, and a fully packed sealed tin will force the lid off or split its seam. A coffee can or pudding mold with foil and kitchen string works as well as the old flaring tin.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, stone-ground and including the bran and germ. Modern whole-wheat flour substitutes directly; the flavor is slightly milder.
- New Orleans molassesCane molasses from Louisiana, the ordinary baking and table molasses of the period, and not blackstrap. Ordinary unsulphured molasses is the closest match.
- Soda and buttermilkTwo teaspoons of baking soda is the entire leavening, and it reacts with the acid in the buttermilk and molasses as soon as it is wet. Mix quickly and get the mold into the water without delay. Cultured buttermilk from the dairy case is acidic enough; sweet milk would give noticeably less lift.
- Bake slowlyThe original gives no temperature; 'slowly' is usually taken as a slow oven, somewhere in the 275-325F range. Two hours there after steaming dries the crust and sets the surface; the loaf is already cooked through by then, so watch for color rather than doneness.
- YieldA large, dense, dark loaf, enough for eight to ten people. It slices best fully cooled, with a thin serrated blade, and keeps several days wrapped.
The name is misleading to anyone raised on Southern cooking, where corn pone means a plain unleavened cornmeal cake baked or fried in a skillet. This is instead a Northern steamed loaf, sibling to Boston brown bread, which pairs cornmeal with coarse wheat and rye flours, sweetens with molasses, and relies on saleratus or soda worked against sour milk instead of yeast. The long boil in a sealed mold suspended in a second kettle was a practical answer to wood and coal ranges whose oven heat was hard to hold steady for hours: water at a rolling boil is self-regulating at 212F, so the loaf cannot scorch, and the short bake at the end only firms the crust. Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the antebellum dietary reformer who preached unsifted whole-meal bread, and its quiet presence in a recipe like this one shows how thoroughly that campaign had settled into ordinary household cooking well after his own vogue had passed.