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Corn Cake (Eggless)
1½ cups buttermilk 1 cup sour cream 1 cup sugar 3 cups corn meal ½ cup Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon soda Pinch of salt
This is a formula rather than a set of instructions — the book assumes the reader knows how to combine and bake a batter of this kind. The proportions are sound; everything else has to be supplied.
- Method, since none is givenWhisk the dry ingredients together, stir in the buttermilk and sour cream just until combined, and pour into a greased pan. The batter is thick and pourable, closer to cornbread than to a butter cake.
- Oven and panThe book gives no oven instruction; a moderate oven, around 350-375F, suits it. A greased 9x13 pan gives a layer roughly an inch deep and should take 30-35 minutes; an 8x8 will need closer to 45.
- Bake it at onceSoda plus buttermilk and soured cream is the only leavening. The gas begins releasing the moment they meet, so have the pan greased and the oven hot before you mix.
- Sour cream then and nowAt the time this meant table cream left to sour naturally -- thick, tangy, and the sole source of fat in the cake. Full-fat cultured sour cream is the right stand-in; low-fat versions tend to leave the crumb dry and crumbly.
- ButtermilkCultured buttermilk from the carton works. Do not substitute sweet milk with a spoon of vinegar here — the recipe needs both the acid and the body, and there is a lot of cornmeal to hydrate.
- Cornmeal grindFine or medium grind, not coarse polenta. Modern degerminated meal may absorb differently from the older whole-grain product, so let the mixed batter stand ten minutes before baking and adjust with a little more meal if it seems too loose.
- Salt and sodaRead the pinch of salt as ½ teaspoon. Measure the soda level and sift or whisk it thoroughly through the dry ingredients, or you will get bitter yellow streaks.
- Sweetness and yieldA cup of sugar to three cups of meal puts this firmly on the cake side of the cornbread line. Expect about 12 squares, served warm with butter.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to buyers of its flour, which explains why the branded flour appears by name in a recipe that is nine-tenths cornmeal. Eggless cakes filled a real need in a period when eggs were seasonal and expensive in much of Canada — hens laid poorly through a prairie winter — and the collection carries a run of them. The chemistry is older than the brand: soda with soured milk or cream was the standard North American leavening from the mid-nineteenth century, and a sweetened cornmeal batter of this kind sits in the long line of Johnny cake and "Indian" cakes that home bakers made from the cheapest meal on hand.