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Corn Cake
1 egg, 1/2 cupful sugar, butter size of an egg, 1 cupful sweet milk, a pinch of salt, 1 cupful of corn meal, 1 cupful of flour, 3 teaspoonfuls of baking-powder. Bake half an hour.
A plain baking-powder corn cake of the northern, lightly sweetened type. The original gives a time but no temperature, and a few of its measures are pre-standardization.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the book supplies no oven term to convert. A moderate oven, around 350-375F, suits this batter; in an 8-inch square pan expect roughly 25-35 minutes, and test with a skewer in the center rather than trusting the clock.
- Butter size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Melt it and let it cool slightly before it goes into the batter so it does not seize against the cold milk.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk. The term distinguishes it from the buttermilk or sour milk used in soda-raised batters, where the acid does the lifting.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons for two cups of dry ingredients is at the heavy end of current practice. Two teaspoons gives a good rise without the metallic edge.
- CornmealUse a medium or fine yellow meal. Coarse stone-ground meal will stay gritty in a batter this wet unless it soaks in the milk for ten minutes before the flour and leavening go in.
- PanNone is specified. An 8-inch square or a 9-inch round, buttered, suits the volume; a loaf pan will need closer to 40 minutes and browns unevenly.
- MixingCombine wet and dry with as few strokes as will wet the flour. Overworking a chemically leavened corn batter gives a tough, tunneled crumb.
- YieldNine squares, or eight wedges. Best eaten warm the day it is baked; cornmeal cakes stale quickly.
Corn cake sits at the point where American cornbread met the commercial baking powder that reached kitchens in quantity from the 1860s onward. Older cornmeal breads relied on eggs, yeast, or sour milk with soda; a tinned powder let a cook mix and bake in under an hour with no fermenting and no guesswork about the sourness of the milk. The half cup of sugar is consistent with a northern recipe -- southern cornbread of the same period tended to be unsweetened and was often made with white meal and little or no wheat flour.