Corn Meal Bread
Rub a piece of butter the size of an egg into a pint of corn meal. Make it a batter with two eggs and some new milk. Add a spoonful of yeast. Set it by the fire an hour to rise. Butter little pans, fill them, and bake.
An unusual yeast-raised cornbread — soft little batter breads leavened the old-fashioned way.
- Butter “the size of an egg”That’s about 4 Tbsp (2 oz) of butter.
- “A pint of corn meal”Roughly 2 cups of cornmeal.
- “New milk”Simply fresh, sweet whole milk, warmed to lukewarm to help the yeast.
- “A spoonful of yeast”This meant liquid barm; use about 1 tsp active dry yeast dissolved in the warm milk.
- Warm rise, then bake“Set by the fire” means a warm spot for the hour’s rise; bake the filled, buttered pans at about 400°F.
Yeast-raised cornbread is a bit of a curiosity, because cornmeal can’t truly rise the way wheat does. Wheat flour contains gluten, the stretchy protein network that traps a yeast’s gas and lets a loaf balloon; corn has none. So a “yeast” cornbread like this one puffs only modestly, leaning on its eggs and the warm rise for a soft, open batter-bread texture rather than a tall loaf. Before packaged yeast, cooks kept the leavening alive as barm — the foamy yeast skimmed from brewing, or a homemade starter — and measured it out by the spoonful.
From page 55 of the 1904 edition.
Original page from the book
