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Corn Rolls
One pint of corn meal, two table-spoons sugar, one tea-spoon salt, one pint boiling milk; stir all together and let stand till cool. Add three eggs well beaten, and bake in gem-pans. -Mrs. Capt. J. P. Rea, Minneapolis, Minn.
A scalded-meal batter leavened by nothing but beaten eggs, so the technique carries the whole recipe. Get the mush smooth and the pans hot and these behave; skip either and you get dense cornmeal lumps.
- Scald properlyPour the boiling milk over the meal all at once and stir hard until no dry pockets remain. This gelatinizes the starch and is the reason the rolls hold together without flour or baking powder.
- Pint means two cupsA pint of cornmeal is 2 cups (roughly 10 oz), a pint of milk 2 cups. The cooled mush will be very stiff before the eggs go in; that is correct.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans are generally regarded as a forerunner of the modern muffin tin. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works, but grease it generously and heat it in the oven first so the batter sets on contact.
- No oven givenThe recipe leaves the heat to the cook's judgment. In a modern oven, around 400 to 425F for roughly 20 to 25 minutes, until well risen and browned at the edges, works.
- Eggs are the leaveningBeat the three eggs until light and frothy and fold them into mush that is cool to the touch, not warm. Warm mush will cook the eggs and cost you the lift.
- Corn meal choiceNineteenth-century meal was generally water-ground and coarser than modern degerminated supermarket cornmeal. Stone-ground yellow meal gives a closer texture and more flavor.
- Yield and servingMakes about a dozen. They are best straight from the pan with butter; without any flour they stale quickly and are poor the next day.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was issued from Minneapolis, growing out of an earlier Marysville, Ohio collection, and was built from recipes solicited from housekeepers, many of them credited to their contributors by name, which is why a Minneapolis captain's wife turns up in a book with Ohio roots. The dish itself belongs to the large family of scalded-meal breads that runs from spoonbread to corn pone: boiling liquid poured over meal was a common way to soften a grain that resisted rising, and eggs supplied what yeast and chemical leaveners did elsewhere. Gem pans, the heavy cast-iron trays these were baked in, were common enough by the 1870s that the book uses the term without explanation, and "gems" appears in it as a category of quick bread in its own right.