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Corn Bread (Two cups of Indian meal one)
Two cups of Indian meal, one cup of wheat, One cup of sour milk, one cup of sweet, One egg that well you beat, Half cup of molasses too, Half cup sugar add thereto, With one spoon of butter new; Salt and soda each a spoon, Mix up quickly and bake it soon, Then you'll have corn bread complete, Best of all corn bread you meet.
A rhymed receipt with no pan, no temperature and no time — the verse assumes a cook who already knows what cornbread should look like going into the oven. The proportions themselves are sound and translate directly.
- Indian meal and wheatIndian meal is cornmeal; use a medium-grind yellow meal for the texture the book intends. "One cup of wheat" means one cup of plain wheat flour, not a whole-wheat product.
- Sour milkSour milk here is naturally clabbered raw milk, mildly acidic and slightly thickened. Buttermilk is the direct modern equivalent, cup for cup; pasteurised milk left out will spoil rather than sour usefully.
- What a "spoon" meansThe verse asks for a spoon each of butter, salt and soda. A tablespoon of butter is right, but a tablespoon of soda would be wildly out of range against one cup of sour milk — read the salt and soda as teaspoons. This is a genuine ambiguity in the original, resolved by the chemistry rather than the text.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Cornbread of this type bakes at 400-425F; the molasses and sugar will brown the crust well before the centre sets if the oven runs much hotter.
- Pan and timeThe batter fits a 9-inch square pan or a 10-inch skillet, greased and preheated if you want a crisp bottom. Reckon on 25-30 minutes, until the centre springs back.
- "Mix up quickly and bake it soon"This is the hinge of the recipe. The soda begins reacting with the sour milk and molasses the moment they meet, and a batter left standing on the bench loses most of its lift. Combine wet and dry with a few strokes and get it into a hot oven.
- SweetnessHalf a cup of molasses plus half a cup of sugar makes a distinctly sweet, dark, cake-like bread — a northern style. Reduce the sugar if you mean to serve it with a savoury dish rather than with butter at breakfast.
- YieldEight to nine squares. It stales quickly, as all cornbread does, and is best the day it is baked.
Rhymed receipts appear in nineteenth-century community cookbooks, and are usually taken to have served as mnemonics: a formula that could be held in the head as a jingle rather than read from a page. Its proportions suggest a northern rather than a Southern style — wheat flour cut into the meal, an egg, and a generous half cup each of molasses and sugar, where cornbread further south more often used meal alone with little or no sweetening. "Indian meal" was the common American term for maize meal from the colonial period into the early twentieth century, distinguishing it from wheat "flour," long the more expensive grain in rural districts. The pairing of sour and sweet milk in one batter may reflect a household with milk on the turn to use up.