Thin Corn Bread
3/4 cup yellow corn meal. 1¼ cups flour. 2 tablespoons sugar. 5 teaspoons baking powder. 3/4 teaspoon salt. 1 cup thin cream. 1 egg well beaten. 2 tablespoons Cottolene.
PROCESS: Mix and sift the dry ingredients; add cream, beaten egg and Cottolene, beat thoroughly; bake in a well-greased, shallow pan, in a hot oven, twenty-five minutes; five minutes before removing from oven, brush over with melted butter or milk to give it a richer color. Serve with baked or broiled fish.
A quick corn bread from a promotional cookbook, meant to bake thin and crisp as an accompaniment to fish. Two of its measurements need judgment before you start.
- CottoleneA branded shortening made from cottonseed oil and beef suet, sold by the company that published this book. Substitute 2 tablespoons of melted vegetable shortening, mild oil or butter.
- The flour measureThe printed page reads 1¼ cups flour, as our text now gives. With 3/4 cup cornmeal against that much flour, the result is a soft, cake-like bread rather than a coarse corn-forward one; five teaspoons of baking powder is right for that proportion.
- Baking powderFive teaspoons is far above modern practice, which runs 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup of dry ingredients. Even with the larger flour reading this is heavy-handed and will leave a soapy, metallic edge. Scale to about 2 teaspoons for a cup and a half of dry mix.
- Thin creamLight cream, roughly 18 to 20 percent fat. Half-and-half is the closest supermarket match; whole milk works but gives a drier crumb.
- Hot ovenRoughly 400 to 450F. At the upper end of that range a genuinely thin batter in a shallow pan may be done before the stated twenty-five minutes, so start checking the centre at about 15 to 20 minutes and go by a clean tester.
- PanThe point is thinness. Use a quarter-sheet pan or an 8-by-8 square rather than a loaf tin, greased well, so the batter sits no more than half an inch deep.
- The butter washBrushing with melted butter or milk near the end is for colour, not moisture. Do it in the last five minutes as directed; earlier and it simply bakes in.
- YieldThe original gives none; the quantities suggest roughly four to six as a side, cut in squares or fingers and served hot.
52 Sunday Dinners was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company as advertising for Cottolene, its cottonseed-oil-and-suet shortening, which is why the fat is named as a brand in an otherwise generic corn bread. Cottonseed oil was a byproduct of the Southern cotton industry that manufacturers spent the late nineteenth century persuading cooks to use in place of lard, and books like this one were the persuasion. The dish itself is Northern in style rather than Southern: sugar, wheat flour, baking powder and cream produce a light, cakey bread quite unlike the unsweetened buttermilk-and-cornmeal breads of the South. Pairing it with baked or broiled fish reflects the period's fixed idea of what belonged on a plate together.