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Loaf Corn Bread
2 cups yellow meal 2 cups Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon salt 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 tablespoon sugar 3 eggs 2 cups milk 3 tablespoons melted butter Measure, mix and sift the dry ingredients, add milk, eggs well beaten and melted butter. Beat long and hard. Bake in a large round loaf in a moderate oven.
A half-and-half meal-and-flour batter bread, richer than most cornbreads of the period thanks to three eggs and a quart-ish of liquid. It bakes as a single tall loaf rather than a pan of squares.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is not defined anywhere in the book; it is usually taken today as somewhere around 325-350F. In a deep round pan the loaf will likely need roughly 45 to 55 minutes; test with a skewer at the centre, which will lag well behind the edges.
- Yellow mealThis is plain yellow cornmeal, not a self-rising cornmeal mix and not corn flour. Medium grind gives the texture the recipe expects; stone-ground meal will drink up more milk and bake a little denser.
- The pan"A large round loaf" means a deep round cake pan, a springform, or a well-greased cast-iron skillet with high sides. With four cups of dry ingredients to two cups of milk and three eggs the batter is thick and spoonable rather than freely pouring, so it needs a vessel deep enough to hold it while it rises.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to four cups of dry ingredients is about a teaspoon per cup, which is in line with other recipes of this general type and still works. Baking powders of this period were more likely than modern ones to give most of their lift on mixing rather than in the oven, so with modern double-acting powder there is less penalty for a short delay between mixing and baking.
- "Beat long and hard"The cornmeal makes up half the dry ingredients, which dilutes the wheat gluten, so beating this batter is less risky than it would be in an all-wheat quick bread. The instruction is aimed at working air into the beaten eggs rather than at kneading; a brisk beating until the batter is smooth is the intent.
- Flour measureHow the cup was filled matters: sifted or lightly spooned flour runs roughly 4 to 4 1/4 oz a cup, scooped flour appreciably more. If the batter looks stiff rather than thick and spoonable, a few tablespoons more milk brings it back.
- Yield and servingOne loaf, roughly eight to ten slices. Baked as a tall round loaf it can be sliced at table; the recipe itself says nothing about how it was served.
Cookbooks issued by flour millers had an obvious interest in getting wheat flour into dishes that had traditionally been made without it, and this recipe is a clear example: a Southern-style corn bread cut half and half with Gold Medal flour, then enriched with eggs, milk and butter until it behaves like a cake batter. The result belongs to what was often called Northern corn bread, sweeter, softer and lighter than the crisp, meal-heavy, sometimes eggless skillet breads of the South. It is baked as a tall round loaf rather than in a shallow pan.