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Corn Bread (One cup flour one-half cup)
One cup flour, one-half cup yellow Indian meal, one tablespoon sugar, one cup milk, one egg beaten in the milk, one large teaspoon melted butter, one heaping teaspoon baking powder. Bake in moderate oven twenty minutes.
— Mrs. Walton Van Loan
A plain village corn bread with more wheat than corn, mixed in the order given and baked as a single pan. A few of the terms need translating.
- Indian mealThis is simply cornmeal. Yellow, medium-grind is what the recipe intends; stone-ground gives a coarser crumb closer to the original.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350-375F. At twenty minutes the bread is only just set at that temperature, so err toward 375F and test with a straw or skewer in the center.
- Pan sizeNo pan is named. The batter is small — roughly two to two and a half cups — and suits an 8-inch square pan or a well-greased 8-inch cast-iron skillet. In anything larger it bakes thin and dry.
- Baking powderA "heaping teaspoon" of period baking powder is roughly 1 1/2 modern teaspoons. Some older powders were single-acting, so mix and get it into the oven promptly rather than letting the batter stand.
- ButterOne large teaspoon is scant by modern standards; a tablespoon of melted butter improves the keeping quality without changing the character. Add it last, after the egg and milk, so it does not seize in cold liquid.
- SaltNone is listed. A half teaspoon of salt is worth adding if your butter is unsalted.
- YieldEight small squares, best eaten warm the day it is made. This ratio — twice as much flour as meal — produces a soft, cakey bread rather than the crumbly all-cornmeal style of the South.
Corn bread recipes in Northern community cookbooks like this one commonly cut the cornmeal with wheat flour, and often sweeten it lightly — a habit that separates them sharply from the unsweetened, flour-free cornbreads of the South. "Indian meal" was the standard American term for maize meal from the colonial period well into the twentieth century, distinguishing it from "meal" or "flour" made from wheat, and it survives in the name Indian pudding. The Catskill book is a fundraising collection of receipts signed by local women, and the Van Loan name was a well-known one in the Catskill village and Greene County area; Walton Van Loan published guidebooks to the Catskill Mountains in the later nineteenth century. Quantities like "one large teaspoon" and "one heaping teaspoon" pass without comment — the contributor assumed a reader who already knew what the batter should look like.