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Corn Bread (Take one quart buttermilk)
Take one quart buttermilk, and one heaping pint corn meal, one tea-spoon soda, one of salt, one table-spoon sugar and three eggs; have the stove very hot, and do not bake in too deep a pan. The batter seems too thin, but bakes very nicely. - Mrs. J. H. Shearer, Marysville, Ohio.
A plain buttermilk batter bread with no wheat flour at all, and far wetter than most modern cornbread. The instruction that matters is the last one: resist the urge to thicken it.
- Do not thicken the batterA quart of buttermilk to a heaping pint of meal gives something closer to pancake batter than dough. Mrs. Shearer says so outright; the meal swells in the pan and the bread sets. Adding flour or extra meal produces a dry, crumbly brick.
- The measures in cupsOne quart buttermilk is 4 cups. A heaping pint of cornmeal is roughly 2 1/2 cups. Three eggs; if yours are jumbo, medium ones are probably nearer what was meant, though the recipe gives no size.
- "Stove very hot"The book gives no temperatures; for a modern oven a hot setting, roughly 425-450F, is a reasonable equivalent. A cast-iron pan or heavy metal pan heated in the oven first, then greased, gives the browned bottom crust this batter needs to set quickly.
- "Not too deep a pan"Spread the batter about 3/4 inch deep -- a 9x13 pan, or two 10-inch skillets. In a deep pan the centre stays wet long after the edges are done.
- Soda and buttermilkOne teaspoon of soda against a full quart of buttermilk leaves plenty of unreacted acid, which is part of the tang. Mix the soda into the dry meal and get the pan into the oven promptly, since the lift begins the moment the liquid hits it.
- No fat in the batterThere is none -- no butter, no drippings, no bacon fat. Grease the pan generously, and expect a lean, slightly custardy crumb that is best eaten warm rather than kept.
- Cornmeal grindPeriod meal was stone-ground and generally coarser than modern degerminated supermarket meal. A medium or coarse stone-ground yellow meal is likely closest to the original.
- Time and yieldFigure 25-35 minutes at 425F for a 9x13 pan, until the top is set and browned and the centre springs back. Serves about 10 to 12.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was assembled from contributions sent in by named women in Ohio, Minnesota and neighbouring states, which is why this page carries Mrs. Shearer's name and her town. Marysville sits in the corn belt, and recipes like this one belong to a household economy where cornmeal came cheap from a local mill and buttermilk was the byproduct of churning butter -- a liquid you had to use up rather than buy. The sugar and the eggs mark it as a northern cornbread; southern books of the same decade are far likelier to skip the sugar entirely. Wheat flour is absent altogether, a reminder that in many farm kitchens wheat was the purchased grain and corn was the one you already had.