Home › The Principles of Cookery › Loaf Cake of Indian Meal
Loaf Cake of Indian Meal
Rub four ounces of fresh butter into one pound of Indian meal. Pour over it as much boiling milk as will make it into a thick batter, and when this is cool stir into it two well-beaten eggs. Stone a quarter of a pound of raisins. Wash, pick, and dry a quarter of a pound of currants. Dredge over them as much fine flour as will adhere to them, and stir them into the batter, and afterwards stir in six ounces of moist sugar. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered mould, and bake in a moderate oven for two hours. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
A cornmeal cake of the plain, dense sort — no leavening at all, so texture depends entirely on scalding the meal properly and beating the eggs well. A few of the terms have shifted since the book was printed.
- Scald the meal firstThe boiling milk poured over the buttered meal is the hinge of the whole recipe. It gelatinises the starch so the cake is moist rather than gritty, and the mixture must be left to cool before the eggs go in or they will scramble.
- Indian mealCornmeal, ground from maize — the nineteenth-century British name for it. Use a fine or medium yellow cornmeal, not coarse polenta grind and not masa harina, which is nixtamalised and behaves differently.
- The milk is unmeasuredThe original says only "as much boiling milk as will make it into a thick batter." For a pound of meal that is likely to be somewhere near 2 to 2½ cups, but add it gradually; the meal absorbs more as it stands, so err on the loose side.
- Moist sugarAn unrefined or partially refined soft sugar of the period, damp and pale brown. Light brown sugar is the closest thing on a modern shelf.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, a small seedless grape — not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. "Wash, pick, and dry" refers to removing stalks and grit, largely unnecessary with packaged fruit today.
- Stone the raisinsRaisins were sold with seeds in. Modern seedless raisins need nothing done to them; go straight to the flour dredge, which keeps the fruit suspended rather than sinking to the base.
- Oven and tinThe book gives no temperature; "a moderate oven" is conventionally taken as somewhere around 350F (175C). Given the two-hour bake and the density of the batter, 325F (165C) in a deep, well-buttered loaf tin or a pudding mould is safer against a scorched crust. Test with a skewer from about 90 minutes.
- Expect a heavy cakeThere is no baking powder, soda or beaten-white aeration here, so this bakes close-textured — nearer a boiled fruit pudding than a sponge. It slices best the day after and is good buttered.
- YieldThe book says six, which is about right for a single loaf served in generous slices.
Cassell's calls this "Indian meal" because that is what maize flour was called in British and American kitchens well into the nineteenth century — Indian corn being the old name for maize, distinguishing it from "corn" in the English sense of grain generally. Recipes of this kind may well have travelled the other way across the Atlantic: cornmeal was cheap, abundant and thoroughly domestic in the United States, and it is a reasonable inference, rather than a documented one, that British compilers picked up a handful of such dishes as economical alternatives to wheat-flour cakes. The costing of one shilling, printed as a matter of course throughout Cassell's, is the tell — this is a household book aimed at readers who needed to know what a cake would cost before deciding to make it. The technique of scalding meal with boiling liquid is older still and appears across the whole family of cornmeal cookery, from hasty pudding to spoonbread, for much the same reason each time: raw cornmeal tends not to soften sufficiently during baking on its own.