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Boiled Corn Bread
2½ cups Cornmeal, tablespoonfuls But- 2 ter, 2 tablespoonfuls. 2 even teaspoonfuls Salt, 2 or 3 Eggs, 1 heaping teaspoonful The Great brown Sugar (or "Arm & Hammer" Soda. gran.) Cook in a double boiler the above quantity of Cornmeal with sufficient water, two tablespoonfuls Butter, three tablespoonfuls Brown Sugar (or granulated) two even teaspoonfuls Salt for about ten minutes.
When this mixture is cooled off some, add two or three eggs well beaten and last, one heaping teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda dissolved in one and a half tablespoonfuls of tepid water. If too stiff add sufficient sour milk. Stir all well together and bake in one or two shallow granite or iron pans for about 30 minutes in a hot oven.
You can prepare this corn-bread in a different way by mixing all the dry ingredients, not including the soda, together and adding enough sour milk, the eggs and butter to it to make a soft batter. Let stand a half hour, then add the soda dissolved in water.
An Arm & Hammer premium booklet recipe, printed with the ingredient column badly jumbled by the typesetter. Read the method paragraph rather than the list: it gives the same quantities in a usable order.
- The ingredient listThe method paragraph supplies 2 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons brown or granulated sugar, 2 level teaspoons salt, 2 to 3 eggs, and 1 heaping teaspoon soda dissolved in 1½ tablespoons tepid water. The cornmeal quantity was checked against the printed page and stands at 2½ cups, as given at the head of the list.
- The hinge: soda needs an acidA heaping teaspoon of baking soda has nothing to react with unless sour milk goes in. In the first method the sour milk is optional ("if too stiff"), which will leave a soapy, faintly yellow, bitter crumb. Add at least ¾ cup cultured buttermilk whichever method you follow, or cut the soda sharply and use baking powder instead.
- Sour milkPeriod sour milk was raw milk left to clabber, roughly as acidic as today's cultured buttermilk. Buttermilk is the direct substitute; milk soured with a spoonful of vinegar is thinner but works.
- A hot ovenRoughly 400-450°F; 425°F is a reasonable setting. The batter is already partly cooked, so it wants heat that sets the surface fast rather than a long slow bake.
- Cook the meal firstTen minutes in a double boiler with enough water to make a loose mush is what gives this bread its damp, almost spoonbread texture. Old stone-ground meal drank more water than modern degerminated cornmeal; start with about 3 cups water to 1½ cups meal and add more if it stiffens into a paste.
- Cool before the eggs"Cooled off some" means below about 140°F. Beaten eggs stirred into hot mush will curdle into threads.
- SaltTwo teaspoons for this quantity is heavy by current taste, particularly with salted butter. One teaspoon is closer to modern seasoning.
- Pans and yield"Granite" is graniteware, enamelled steel. One 9-inch skillet or square pan, or two shallow pans for thinner, crustier bread. Serves six to eight; best eaten warm, as the mush base goes heavy once cold.
Arm & Hammer's recipe booklets were give-away advertising, packed in with the soda or mailed on request, and every recipe in them exists to move product — hence a heaping teaspoon of soda in a bread that would be perfectly good with less. The dish itself is older than the booklet: boiling or scalding cornmeal before baking is standard practice across nineteenth-century American cookery, from spoonbread to Rhode Island jonnycakes, because coarse stone-ground meal is gritty and slow to hydrate and a stint in the pot softens it. Soda paired with sour milk was the ordinary leavening of the period, cheaper and more familiar than commercial baking powder, which only became common in American kitchens in the second half of the century. The second method given here, letting the batter stand half an hour before the soda goes in, is a soaking step for the same reason — give the meal time to swell.