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Carolina Corn Cake
Three pints of Indian meal and wheat flour mixed together, three pints sour milk, two small teaspoonfuls of soda, not heaped, just even full, dissolved in half a cup of the sour milk, then strain it in the mixture, two tablespoonfuls of sugar, a little salt, and three well beaten eggs. Bake in bread tins, or gem pans well heated.
A big, plain quick bread from the era when sour milk was a daily by-product rather than something you bought. The recipe assumes you know what a hot gem pan does; nearly everything else needs translating.
- Indian mealIndian meal is cornmeal — in this period usually stone-ground and coarser than the modern boxed sort. Medium-grind yellow cornmeal is the closest match.
- The proportions are unstated"Three pints of Indian meal and wheat flour mixed together" gives the total, not the ratio. Half and half is the usual reading and behaves well; more cornmeal makes it crumblier and more assertive.
- Pints to cupsThree pints is 6 cups of dry mixture and 6 cups of sour milk — a very wet batter by modern standards, closer to a thick pour than a scoopable dough. That is correct for this kind of cake.
- Sour milkSour milk here meant milk naturally clabbered, mildly acidic and thickened. Cultured buttermilk is the working substitute; plain kefir or milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar per cup also works, though the flavour is flatter.
- The soda stepDissolving the soda in a little of the milk and straining it in is not fussiness — undissolved lumps leave bitter yellow-green specks. Two level teaspoons is right for this much acid milk, and the batter should go into the pans as soon as it is mixed, before the lift is spent.
- Oven heatNone is given. Bake gem pans at 425F for 20-25 minutes and bread tins at 400F for 35-45 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.
- Well-heated pansThe instruction to heat the pans matters most. Grease cast-iron gem or muffin pans, put them in the oven until the fat shimmers, then pour in the batter — that is what gives the crisp shell this cake is made for.
- YieldAs written it fills two loaf tins, or upwards of two dozen gems. Halving it is sensible for a household of two or three; corn breads stale quickly and are best the day they are baked.
Corn bread leavened with sour milk and soda is a mainstay of nineteenth-century American breakfast baking, and the mixed-meal version here — cornmeal cut with wheat flour — softened the crumb compared with a plainer all-cornmeal bread. Why the title says "Carolina" cannot be established from the recipe itself. The gem pan the recipe calls for was a heavy cast-iron tray of shallow cups, in use from around the 1870s and prized precisely because it could be preheated until the fat smoked; the batter set on contact and produced the crusted edge that a modern tin, thinner and cooler, has to work harder to achieve.