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Bread, Indian Corn
Mix half a pint of white Indian meal, coarsely ground, with one pint of fresh milk, one egg, and a pinch of salt. Get ready a tin of, say four inches diameter at the bottom, and three inches deep, grease it well, and pour in the batter, which should only half fill the dish. Bake in a tolerably quick oven and serve very hot, on a white d'oyley, or, if preferred, halve it and butter it. Time, thirty to forty minutes. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A plain baked cornmeal batter, closer to a spoonbread or a soft cornmeal pudding than to a loaf. The proportions are wet by modern standards, and that is deliberate.
- Indian mealIndian meal is cornmeal, here the white variety and coarsely ground. Stone-ground white cornmeal is the closest match; degerminated fine yellow meal will give a smoother, blander result.
- Imperial measuresThe imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so the milk is about 2½ US cups and the half pint of meal about 1¼ cups by volume, somewhere in the region of 5-6 oz depending on the grind. That is a loose batter, which is why it sets as a soft pudding rather than a bread.
- No leaveningThere is no soda, baking powder or yeast. The single egg and the steam from the milk do all the lifting, so expect a moist, custardy crumb with a browned top, not an open loaf.
- "Tolerably quick" ovenVictorian oven terms are approximate. A quick oven is usually read as somewhere around 425-450F, and "tolerably quick" as a little below that, roughly 400-425F. Start at the higher end and drop if the top colours before the centre sets.
- The tinFour inches across at the bottom and three inches deep, half filled. A 4-inch souffle dish, a large ramekin or a small deep cake tin works; grease it heavily, as there is no added fat in the batter.
- DonenessThirty to forty minutes is right for that depth, but test rather than trust the clock: a skewer into the middle should come out clean and the top should feel set, not liquid, under a finger.
- ServingA d'oyley is a doily, a decorative napkin under the dish. Serve it straight from the oven; it firms and dries as it cools, and the split-and-buttered version in the original is the better treatment for anything left over.
- YieldThree to four as a side or a breakfast dish. The stated cost of sixpence marks it as an inexpensive dish.
In British cookery writing of the nineteenth century, "corn" still meant grain in general, chiefly wheat, so maize had to be specified as "Indian corn" and its meal as "Indian meal" -- the name is usually traced to the early colonial description of maize as a grain of the Indies. Large quantities of American Indian meal reached Britain and Ireland from the 1840s onward, much of it as cheap relief food, and it kept a reputation as an economical grain long afterwards. Recipes like this one, with no leavening and a high proportion of milk, belong to the same family as American spoonbread and the various cornmeal "mushes" and puddings.