Corn Cake
One pint Indian meal, one pint sweet milk, two tablespoonfuls melted butter, two eggs, two tablespoons sugar, one teaspoonful cream-tarter, one half teaspoonful soda, a little salt. This makes one square tin. Bake about half an hour in a hot oven.
A plain all-cornmeal breakfast bread with no wheat flour at all, which makes it denser and grittier than the cakey cornbread most people expect. The proportions work, but a few of the terms need translating.
- Indian mealThis is cornmeal, yellow or white. Nineteenth-century meal was usually stone-ground and coarser than modern degerminated supermarket cornmeal; a medium or coarse stone-ground meal gives a texture much closer to the original.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that many recipes of the period called for. Whole milk is the right choice here.
- LeaveningOne teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon of soda is a homemade equivalent of roughly 1.5 to 2 teaspoons of modern baking powder. If you substitute, use baking powder and omit both. Mix and get it into the oven promptly, as the acid-and-soda reaction starts as soon as the batter is wet.
- A hot ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; a hot oven of the period is usually read as somewhere around 400-425F. Corn batter benefits from the initial blast; a cooler oven leaves it pale and heavy.
- One square tinProbably an 8-inch square pan. Grease it well, ideally with butter, and preheat it if you want a crisper base. Thirty minutes in a hot oven should be about right; a skewer in the centre should come out clean.
- No wheat flourThe recipe calls for none at all. Expect a crumbly, sandy-textured cake that cuts cleanly only when slightly cooled. It is best eaten hot with butter, and it stales quickly.
- YieldA tin of this size cuts into nine generous squares, enough for a family breakfast.
Cornmeal breads run straight through nineteenth-century American cookery, and the word "Indian" in Indian meal is a survival from the colonial habit of distinguishing native maize from the "corn" of England, which meant grain in general. Recipes like this one sat at the point where a plain daily bread was drifting toward something sweeter: two tablespoons of sugar and two eggs are more than a working cornbread needed, but far less than a cake. Packaged baking powder was widely available from the later nineteenth century, but some cooks went on buying cream of tartar and soda separately. Corn cake was hot-bread food, baked in the morning and eaten the same hour.