Aunt Anne's Delicious Corn-Bread
Baltimore
One cupful of white corn meal, one cupful of boiled hominy, knead two eggs in the hominy, put in a piece of butter, melted the size of a hickory nut, one pinch of salt, one good pinch of sugar, whip all that together, add corn meal and cold milk alternately to a thick consistency until it drops off the spoon in a thick batter, like a thick mush. Sometimes put in a pinch of yeast powder, just as you are going to put it to bake. Mix it well, bake it and serve. Don't let it stand.
This is a spoonbread in disguise — cooked hominy is what gives the crumb its soft, custardy body.
- Butter “size of a hickory nut”A hickory nut is small, so figure about 1 Tbsp of melted butter.
- “Boiled hominy” decodedUse warm cooked hominy grits or well-mashed canned hominy; mashing it smooth lets the eggs beat in cleanly.
- “Yeast powder” = baking powderThe optional pinch is baking powder, not yeast; about ½ tsp lightens the batter.
- Batter, not doughAdd cornmeal and cold milk alternately until it “drops off the spoon” like thick mush — pourable but not runny.
- Bake it hot, right awayThe note to “not let it stand” matters with baking powder: get it into a greased pan at 425–450°F while the leavening is fresh.
Cornbread is one of the oldest dishes in the American kitchen, and the hominy in this Baltimore version points straight to its Native American roots. Hominy takes its name from a word in the Virginia Algonquian languages — part of the same broad Algonquian family that also gave English pone and succotash. The food itself is corn soaked in an alkaline solution to loosen its tough hulls, the ancient process now called nixtamalization. Folding that soft, cooked corn back into a cornmeal batter gives this loaf its tender, almost pudding-like crumb, a trick Southern cooks relied on long before commercial baking powder existed.
From page 52 of the 1904 edition.
Original pages from the book
