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Corn Meal Cake
1 quart sweet milk 4 teaspoons baking powder 4 eggs 1 tablespoon salt 1 cup sugar 1 cup Five Roses flour Corn meal to make stiff batter Bake 1/2 hour
This is a corn bread in cake's clothing: no fat, no creaming, and an ingredient list that stops short of telling you how much cornmeal to use. Two numbers need attention before you start.
- The salt is almost certainly wrongThe salt is high -- a tablespoon against a quart of milk and a cup of sugar will taste assertive, and it may well be a misprint for a teaspoon. If in doubt, start with about a teaspoon and a half and adjust to taste.
- How much cornmeal"Stiff batter" here means a batter that mounds on the spoon but still pours, not a dough. With a quart of milk, four eggs and a cup of flour, expect to add somewhere in the range of 3 to 4 cups of cornmeal, added gradually. The original genuinely does not specify, and cornmeal grinds vary in absorbency.
- No oven temperatureThe book assumes you know your own stove. A batter this wet in a large pan wants 375-400F; at half an hour it will only be done if the layer is shallow, so use two 9-inch square pans or a large sheet pan rather than one deep tin.
- Grease and preheat the panThere is no butter or lard in the batter at all, which makes the tin the only source of richness and the only insurance against sticking. Grease generously and, if you want a crisp bottom crust, heat the greased pan in the oven before pouring.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, as opposed to the sour milk or buttermilk that would demand saleratus instead of baking powder. Whole milk is the right substitution.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour, still sold. Ordinary all-purpose flour behaves the same way in a batter this small in flour.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons is right for the volume, but early-1900s baking powders were often single-acting. With modern double-acting powder the batter can stand a few minutes while you fill pans without losing lift.
- Yield and servingA quart of milk makes a large quantity, roughly 16 squares. Best warm, split with butter, and best eaten the day it is made; cornmeal cakes without fat stale quickly.
Corn meal cake sits at the seam between two traditions. The Five Roses book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell wheat flour, and a recipe like this one, with a single cup of flour to several cups of cornmeal, is a reminder of how large a place cornmeal still held in North American home baking. "Cake" was used loosely at the time for a range of sweetened batters baked in a tin, from johnnycake to layer cake. The absence of butter or lard is also characteristic of the type, which relied on eggs and a heavily greased hot pan for tenderness and crust.