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Kentucky Corn Bread
To one and a half pints of corn-meal, use a pint of buttermilk, one egg, a small teaspoonful of soda, one of salt, and one tablespoonful of lard or butter. Mix thoroughly and bake in a quick oven.
A plain Southern-style cornbread: no wheat flour, no sugar, and buttermilk with soda for lift. The batter goes into a hot greased pan, and that is where most of the character comes from.
- Measures in cupsA pint is 2 cups, so this is 3 cups cornmeal to 2 cups buttermilk. That ratio gives a stiff mixture rather than a thin pouring batter; add buttermilk a spoonful at a time if your meal is unusually coarse or dry.
- "Quick oven"Usually reckoned at roughly 400-425F. Cornbread with no sugar and no wheat flour will take the upper end of that range; it sets fast and browns without burning.
- The hinge: preheat the greased panPreheating the greased pan -- a common practice with cornbread of this type, though the recipe specifies neither a skillet nor a hot pan: melt the lard or butter in a cast-iron skillet or pan in the oven while it heats, then pour the hot fat into the batter, stir, and pour the batter back into the pan for a crisper crust.
- Corn-mealThe book means stone-ground white or yellow meal, not the degerminated fine grind sold today and not self-rising cornmeal mix, which already contains leavening and salt. If you use a mix, omit the soda and salt.
- Soda"Soda" here is baking soda (saleratus in older books), not baking powder. A small teaspoonful is about 3/4 teaspoon, which is right for 2 cups of buttermilk; more will taste soapy.
- ButtermilkCultured buttermilk from a carton works. Sweet milk will not react with the soda, so the bread will be flat and faintly metallic; if that is all you have, use baking powder instead.
- Timing and yield20-25 minutes in a 9- or 10-inch skillet, until the top is set and the edges pull away. Serves six to eight, and it is best within the hour.
Cornbread made with meal alone, buttermilk and soda is the older Southern pattern, distinct from the sweetened, flour-heavy Northern versions; Kentucky and Tennessee recipes of this kind routinely omit sugar altogether. The "Kentucky" label in a compilation like this is best read as shorthand for that style rather than as a claim about a particular town or family. The reliance on buttermilk suggests a household that churned its own butter and had the sour milk to spare, and the soda points to the mid-nineteenth-century arrival of cheap chemical leavening, which let a cook get bread on the table in half an hour without yeast.