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Southern Spoon Bread
3 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 2 cupfuls cornmeal 1 quart milk 1 teaspoonful salt 3 eggs Heat milk to boiling point, then stir in meal and salt; add Crisco and cook five minutes. Cool mixture, add yolks of eggs well beaten, then beat whites of eggs to stiff froth and fold in. Pour batter into Criscoed two quart pan and bake in moderate oven forty minutes. Serve while hot, using a spoon with which to serve it. This is especially good served with roast pork. Sufficient for one large pan of bread.
A straightforward cornmeal pudding-bread that needs almost no translation, though two details in the original are worth pinning down.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" here means 350F. Forty minutes at that heat gives a set custardy center with a browned top; if the middle still slumps like batter, give it another five to ten minutes rather than raising the heat.
- CriscoThe recipe comes from a Procter & Gamble promotional cookbook, hence the shortening. Modern Crisco works, and so do butter or bacon fat, which suit the pork pairing better.
- CornmealUse plain fine or medium stone-ground white cornmeal, not self-rising cornmeal mix and not coarse polenta. There is no leavening beyond the egg whites, so a mix containing baking powder and flour would change the texture entirely.
- The mush stageStir the meal into boiling milk steadily and expect it to seize into a thick porridge within a minute. The five minutes of cooking is what gelatinizes the starch; skip it and the finished bread is gritty.
- Cooling before the eggsLet the mush drop to warm, not hot, before the yolks go in, or they will scramble in streaks. It should be comfortable to touch the side of the pan.
- Folding the whitesThis is the hinge. The stiff whites are the only lift in the dish, so fold in thirds with a light hand and get the batter into the oven at once. Beaten whites stirred flat give a dense cornmeal pudding instead of spoon bread.
- PanA two-quart pan means a deep casserole or baking dish, not a shallow sheet. Grease it well; spoon bread sticks.
- Yield and servingThe pan serves six to eight as a side. It is meant to be scooped out with a large spoon straight onto the plate, soft and steaming, with butter or pork gravy; it will not slice and it collapses as it cools, so serve it immediately.
Spoon bread belongs to the long line of Southern cornmeal batter breads that stayed soft enough to eat with a spoon rather than cut into wedges, and it is generally traced to the Native American and colonial practice of cooking cornmeal into a mush before baking it. The addition of separately beaten egg whites, which turns the mush into something closer to a savory souffle, appears in nineteenth-century Virginia and Carolina cookery and is what distinguishes spoon bread from plain corn pone or hoecake. Its appearance in a Crisco-sponsored recipe collection of the 1910s shows how readily the new hydrogenated vegetable shortening was written into regional dishes that had generally been made with lard or butter, and the pairing with roast pork is the older habit surviving inside the advertisement.