Home › Village Receipts › Corn Bread (One cup yellow meal one cup)
Corn Bread (One cup yellow meal one cup)
One cup yellow meal, one cup flour, two teaspoons baking powder, one-half cup sugar, one and one-half cups milk, four tablespoons melted butter, two well-beaten eggs.
— Mrs. I. R. Fitchett
A standard Northern-style corn bread: sweet, cakey, half wheat flour. The receipt gives ingredients and nothing else, so the method and oven are left to the cook.
- Oven and timeThe receipt gives neither. A modern reconstruction: bake at about 400F for 20-25 minutes in a greased 8-inch square pan or 9-inch skillet. The batter is loose and sweet, and too hot an oven will brown the crust before the centre sets.
- The missing saltNo salt is listed; salted butter would have supplied some. Add half a teaspoon to the dry ingredients if using unsalted butter.
- Yellow mealPeriod yellow meal was often stone-ground and coarser than modern degerminated cornmeal. A medium or coarse grind gives closer to the intended texture; fine meal makes it more cake than bread.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to two cups of dry ingredients works out at about a teaspoon per cup, in line with ordinary modern practice. Use double-acting powder and get the pan into the oven promptly.
- MethodWhisk the dry ingredients, combine milk, eggs and melted butter separately, then stir the two together only until no dry flour remains. Overworking a half-wheat batter toughens it.
- SweetnessHalf a cup of sugar to one cup of meal is firmly in the Northern camp and will taste like a sweet quick bread. Cut it to a quarter cup if serving alongside a savoury dish.
- YieldMakes one 8-inch pan, roughly nine squares. Best eaten warm the day it is baked; it dries quickly.
Corn bread split along regional lines well before this book was compiled, and this receipt sits squarely on the Northern side of the line: equal parts wheat flour and meal, sugar, whole eggs, butter and milk, leavened with baking powder rather than soda and sour milk. Southern cooks of the same period were more likely to use white meal, little or no sugar, and bacon fat in a preheated skillet. Yellow meal was generally the Northern preference. Community cookbooks like this one collected such receipts under contributors' names, and the shorthand ingredient list with no method assumes a reader who had made corn bread many times and needed only the proportions.