Corn Bread
1 cupful cornmeal 2 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 1 cupful flour 1/2 cupful sugar 1 cupful sour cream 2 eggs 1/2 teaspoonful baking soda 1/2 teaspoonful salt Mix cornmeal with flour, sugar, salt, Crisco, eggs well beaten, and soda mixed with cream. Mix well and turn into Criscoed tin and bake in moderate oven thirty minutes.
Sufficient for one small pan of corn bread.
A sweet, Northern-style cornbread from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks. The leavening is the part that needs attention: half a teaspoon of soda and nothing else, relying entirely on the acidity of soured cream.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. Thirty minutes suits an 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan; test at 25 minutes, since the sugar browns the surface before the center sets.
- Sour cream then and nowAt the time this meant cream that had soured naturally and was thinner and tangier than today's product, though its acidity varied. Commercial cultured sour cream is thicker and milder; full-fat cultured sour cream works, and well-shaken buttermilk gives a closer match to the batter's original consistency.
- Leavening is marginalHalf a teaspoon of soda against one cup of sour cream produces a dense, tender crumb rather than a high rise. If your soda is old, replace it — there is no baking powder here to cover for it.
- CriscoStill sold, and the recipe exists to promote it. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works; melted butter improves the flavor. "Criscoed tin" simply means a greased pan.
- Cornmeal grindCornmeal of this period was often coarser and less refined than modern supermarket meal. Fine degerminated meal gives a smoother, cakier result; stone-ground medium meal gives more character and a slightly grittier crumb.
- SweetnessHalf a cup of sugar to one cup of cornmeal puts this firmly in the sweet Northern camp. Cut it to a quarter cup if you want something to serve with beans or greens rather than at breakfast.
- Yield"One small pan" is roughly an 8-inch square, cutting into nine squares. Best eaten warm the day it is baked.
This comes from the run of cookbooks Procter & Gamble commissioned after introducing Crisco in 1911, in which recipes were routinely rewritten to specify the new hydrogenated shortening in place of butter, lard or drippings — hence "Criscoed tin" as a verb. The cornbread itself is the sweetened, flour-extended Northern type: half cornmeal, half wheat flour, a generous half cup of sugar, closer to a cake than to the unsweetened skillet breads of the South, where flour and sugar in cornbread were long regarded with suspicion. The use of sour cream as both fat and acid is older than the book and belonged to households that skimmed their own milk; pairing it with a measured half teaspoon of soda reflects the shift from guessing at saleratus to standardized spoon measures, generally traced to the late nineteenth century and to Fannie Farmer's 1896 cookbook.