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Western Corn Bread
Take one pint of meal, pour boiling water on it, and stir until it is about as thick as griddle-cakes. Add one small tablespoonful of salt, about three-fourths of a cup of brown sugar or molases; then stir in wheat flour until it is quite stiff. When cool enough, add onehalf cup of lively yeast. Put it in a warm place to rise, and when light mould it into a loaf with flour, mixing as soft as possible;
A yeast-raised cornmeal loaf rather than the quick baking-powder cornbread most cooks expect today. The printed text breaks off after moulding the loaf, so the baking is left to you.
- Scald the meal firstPouring boiling water over the cornmeal and letting it swell is the step the whole loaf depends on. Unscalded meal stays gritty and will not hold water, and the bread turns out dry and crumbling.
- A pint of mealTwo cups of cornmeal by volume, roughly 10 oz. Use plain yellow or white cornmeal, not a self-rising mix and not corn flour.
- "Lively yeast"This means a homemade liquid yeast or barm, active and foaming. Half a cup of it corresponds to about one packet (2 1/4 tsp) of modern dry yeast, but you lose the half cup of liquid, so slacken the dough with warm water to compensate.
- Rising timeHomemade yeast varied in strength from batch to batch, so a warm-place rise could run considerably longer than a modern one. With modern yeast expect the first rise in 60-90 minutes and a shaped rise of 45 minutes or so. Judge by the dough, not the clock.
- Salt and sugarThe recipe calls for "one small tablespoonful" of salt, still on the heavy side for one loaf; two teaspoons is closer to current practice. Three-quarters of a cup of brown sugar or molasses gives a distinctly sweet, dark loaf, in the New England brown-bread register.
- Flour to stiffenNo quantity is given because the meal's absorbency varies. Expect somewhere between 2 and 3 cups of wheat flour; stop while the dough is still tacky, as the instruction to mix "as soft as possible" is deliberate.
- The missing bakeThe original stops mid-sentence. A loaf this size and sweetness suits a moderate oven, 350F, for 45 to 55 minutes in a greased loaf pan; the sugar and molasses will darken the crust early, so tent it if needed.
- YieldOne large loaf. It slices best fully cooled and is very good toasted the next day.
Yeast-raised corn breads like this one sat between two traditions: the wheat loaf of the eastern bakehouse and the skillet corn bread of the frontier. Cornmeal alone has no gluten, so it cannot hold a yeast rise, and recipes of this type solve the problem by scalding the meal for flavour and moisture and then building a proper dough on wheat flour. The molasses or brown sugar is both a sweetener and yeast food, and reflects a period when molasses was the cheapest sweetening in an American pantry. The call for "lively yeast" dates the recipe as much as anything else: before compressed and packaged yeast became reliable and universal, a cook kept her own liquid yeast going, often raised on hops or potato, and its vigour on any given day determined how long the bread took. "Western" here is an imprecise descriptor, seemingly signalling a plainer, cornmeal-heavier loaf than an eastern housekeeper might bake, rather than any documented regional original.