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Corn Bread (One cup fine yellow meal one)
One cup fine yellow meal, one and one-half cups flour, two teaspoons baking powder, two tablespoons sugar, one tablespoon butter, one and one-half cups milk, the yolks of two eggs; bake in a shallow pan.
— Mrs. E. G. Beach
A plain northern cornbread: more wheat flour than meal, lightly sweetened, and enriched with yolks alone. It comes together in one bowl and bakes in about twenty minutes.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given. Bake at 400-425F. "A shallow pan" means an 8-inch square or a 9-inch round, greased; the batter should sit about an inch deep so it bakes through in 20-25 minutes.
- The missing saltThere is none in the list, and the bread tastes flat without it. Half a teaspoon with the dry ingredients suits this quantity.
- Fine yellow mealFine-ground cornmeal, not the coarse stone-ground meal sold for polenta. Coarser meal will need the batter to rest 10 minutes so the grains hydrate, or the crumb will be gritty.
- Yolks onlyTwo yolks give a tender, close, cake-like crumb rather than a risen one. The whites are left over; whisking them in whole instead makes a lighter, drier bread, which is not what this receipt is after.
- ButterOne tablespoon is a modest amount by modern standards. Melt it and add it with the milk and yolks rather than cutting it in.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons is a little short of modern proportions for 2 1/2 cups of dry ingredients but works. Mix wet into dry quickly and get it into the oven without long delay.
- YieldAn 8-inch pan cuts into nine squares, enough for a family breakfast or to go alongside soup. Best eaten warm the day it is made.
Cornbread of this kind sits at the northern edge of a very long argument about the dish. Southern versions of the same era typically use all cornmeal, buttermilk, soda and little or no sugar; northern ones like this one dilute the meal with wheat flour, sweeten it, lean on chemical baking powder, and end up closer to a cake. That was partly taste and partly supply: wheat flour was cheap and widely available in the Northeast by the later nineteenth century, so cornmeal had stopped being the grain of necessity it had been a century earlier and became one ingredient among several. The signed attribution to Mrs. E. G. Beach is typical of the community-cookbook form, in which recipes were gathered from named local women; such collections assume a cook who already knows what a shallow pan and a hot oven mean, which is why so much here goes unsaid.