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Corn Bread (One pint corn meal sifted one)
One pint corn meal sifted, one pint flour, one pint sour milk, two eggs beaten light, one-half cup sugar, piece of butter size of an egg; add, the last thing, one tea-spoon soda in a little milk; add to the beaten egg the milk and meal alternately, then the butter and sugar. If sweet milk is used, add one tea-spoon cream tartar; bake twenty minutes in a hot oven. - Mrs. H. B. Sherman, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
A straightforward soda-risen corn bread from a Milwaukee contributor, half cornmeal and half wheat flour, which gives a softer, cakier crumb than an all-meal Southern bread. The measurements are workable once the old volume equivalents and the vague butter are pinned down.
- The pint measureA pint here is two cups. So: 2 cups cornmeal, 2 cups flour, 2 cups sour milk. With four cups of dry to two of liquid plus the eggs, the batter is thick rather than pourable.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Melt it and let it cool slightly before it goes in, or it will set into flecks against the cold milk.
- Sour milk means buttermilkNineteenth-century sour milk was raw milk left to clabber, and its acid is what activates the soda. Cultured buttermilk is the direct modern substitute; ordinary milk soured with vinegar works but is thinner.
- A hot ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. Twenty minutes is right for a shallow pan; a deeper 9-inch square will want 25 to 30 minutes, until the centre springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- The cream of tartar optionIf you use sweet milk instead of sour, the teaspoon of cream of tartar supplies the acid the soda needs. One teaspoon is a little light for a teaspoon of soda -- two is the usual proportion -- so the rise will be modest.
- Soda last, oven readyThe soda is dissolved in a little milk and stirred in at the very end for a reason: the acid begins working as soon as it meets the soda, and much of the lift is lost if the batter stands. Have the pan greased and the oven at temperature before it goes in.
- Cornmeal grindSifting would have removed the coarsest particles, leaving a medium to fine meal. Stone-ground medium meal gives the right texture; coarse polenta grind will stay gritty in twenty minutes of baking.
- Pan and yieldFills a 9-inch square pan or a large cast-iron skillet and serves eight to ten. Best eaten warm the day it is baked.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) was assembled from recipes sent in by housewives across the Midwest, which is why this one carries a name and a city rather than an anonymous heading. The half-and-half proportion of cornmeal to wheat flour, plus sugar and eggs, is characteristic of Northern corn bread; Southern corn breads of the period tended to use little or no sugar and often no wheat flour, though the sharp regional rule is easier to state than to document for the 1870s. Sour milk raised with saleratus or soda was the standard quick-bread chemistry of the era, since fresh milk kept badly and clabbered milk was simply what the household had; the cream of tartar note is there for the cook lucky enough to have sweet milk on hand and needing to supply the missing acid herself. Milwaukee in the 1870s was a milling and brewing city with a large German population, and contributions like this one show how widely the compilers cast their net beyond Ohio.