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Excellent Corn Bread
1 tablespoonful Butter, pinch Salt, 2 tablespoonfuls Sugar, Yolks two eggs, ¾ even teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda. 1 pt. yellow Cornmeal, 1 pt. Sour Milk or Buttermilk.
Melt the butter and rub together with the sugar and yolks of two eggs, add a pinch of salt. Then mix the yellow corn meal with 3/4 even teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda; pour it slowly into the above mixture, also add one pint sour milk or buttermilk, but not either of them at the same time; pour in part of the milk, then some of the meal, then more milk and so on. In the meantime you have the two egg whites beaten stiff, and mix carefully, stirring batter as little as possible. Use flour dusted square tins and bake in hot oven. Nothing better.
A soda-raised cornmeal batter lightened with beaten egg whites — closer to a spoonbread than to a modern sweet cornbread. It depends entirely on the acid in the sour milk, so the milk matters more than anything else here.
- Work quickly once the soda is wetThe soda begins reacting the moment it meets the buttermilk, and there is no baking powder to give a second lift in the oven. Have the tins greased and floured and the oven fully heated before you combine anything.
- Sour milk means cultured milkIn the period this was raw milk left to sour naturally. Use commercial buttermilk; plain kefir or milk soured with a tablespoon of lemon juice per cup also works. Ordinary milk that has spoiled in a modern refrigerator is not a substitute and should be discarded.
- MeasurementsA pint is 2 cups. Two cups of cornmeal to two cups of buttermilk gives a loose, pourable batter — that is correct for this style, and it should not be thickened to a scoopable dough.
- Soda quantityThree-quarters of a level teaspoon for two cups of cornmeal and two cups of buttermilk is on the modest side; excess soda in cornmeal tastes soapy and can turn the crumb greyish-green.
- Yellow cornmealPeriod yellow meal was stone-ground and coarser than most supermarket cornmeal. Medium-grind gives the closest texture; fine degerminated meal will bake softer and blander.
- "Hot oven"Read that as roughly 400-425F. A shallow square tin of 8 or 9 inches will take roughly 25 to 30 minutes; the top should be well browned and the centre set.
- Alternating milk and mealThe instruction not to add both at once is sound. Adding the liquid in stages keeps the meal from clumping without the vigorous beating that would knock the air out of the whites.
- Folding the whitesStir as little as the recipe says. Fold in thirds with a spatula and stop while streaks are still visible — this is the only mechanical lift in the bread.
- YieldThe recipe says 'tins', plural, but the quantity will fill one 8- or 9-inch square pan, serving six to eight. Best eaten warm; the low sugar and high moisture mean it stales fast.
Recipe pamphlets given away by baking soda makers were among the most widely distributed cookbooks in America between the 1860s and the 1920s, and their purpose was straightforward: teach households to reach for soda by name. The chemistry being sold here is genuinely old, though — soda plus a sour dairy liquid was the standard leavening in American kitchens before commercial baking powder became cheap and reliable, and cornbread was its natural home, since cornmeal has no gluten to trap gas and needs a fast chemical lift. The addition of separately beaten egg whites marks this as a company table version rather than a plain field cornbread: sugar, butter, egg yolks and whipped whites all push it toward the softer, cakier Northern style, as does the yellow meal.