Home › Bread › Corn Cake with Suet
Corn Cake with Suet
1 cup corn meal 1 cup Gold Medal flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon soda 1/2 cup chopped suet 2 cups sour milk Mix and sift the dry ingredients, add suet and the sour milk. Beat well and bake in a moderate oven one-half hour. May be eaten with syrup but is recommended only for zero weather.
A plain soda-risen corn bread enriched with beef suet, and the book's own note about zero weather is a fair warning: this is heavy, filling cold-weather food with no sugar in it at all.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Half an hour suits a shallow pan such as an 8-inch square or a 9-inch cast-iron skillet; a thicker pan will likely need 35-40 minutes and a tester in the center.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers and increasingly by mail order. Buy it in the piece, chill it hard, then chop or grate it fine so it renders into the crumb instead of leaving pockets. Frozen shredded suet sold for puddings works, as does the flour-dusted packet type.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means milk left to sour and clabber naturally, acidic enough to react with the half teaspoon of soda. Cultured buttermilk is the direct modern substitute, cup for cup. Ordinary milk soured with vinegar or lemon juice will work but rises less confidently.
- Batter consistencyTwo cups of liquid to two cups of dry gives a pourable, almost pancake-thin batter. That is correct for this style of corn cake; do not thicken it toward a modern cornbread dough.
- CornmealUse plain stone-ground or degerminated yellow cornmeal, not self-rising cornmeal mix, which already contains leavening and salt. A medium grind gives the best texture against the wheat flour.
- Gold Medal flourA standard all-purpose wheat flour; any modern all-purpose flour substitutes directly. The wheat is there to lighten the cornmeal and hold the loaf together.
- Mix and bake at onceOnce the soda meets the sour milk the gas starts immediately. Have the pan greased and the oven at temperature before you combine, and get it in without delay.
- Yield and servingMakes one 8-inch pan, six to eight squares. Serve hot with syrup or molasses as the book suggests; suet firms up unpleasantly as it cools, so reheat any leftovers rather than eating them cold.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was published by the Washburn-Crosby Company of Minneapolis, the milling firm that later became part of General Mills, and it exists to put the brand's flour into as many recipes as possible, including ones that had never traditionally used wheat. Corn cake baked with soda and soured milk descends from the older American johnnycake and corn pone tradition, and wheat flour was often added to lighten the cornmeal. What makes this version unusual is the half cup of chopped suet, a straight infusion of hard beef fat that turns a modest quick bread into serious caloric fuel; the dry aside that it is "recommended only for zero weather" has a practical basis, since suet-enriched breads and puddings were long treated as winter and heavy-labor food in both British and northern American kitchens. Suet was cheap, always available where beef was butchered, and stayed sound in a cold larder far longer than butter.