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White Corn Bread
4 cups white corn meal 1 tablespoon melted butter 1 teaspoon salt 2 cups sour milk 1 teaspoon soda 3 eggs Scald the corn meal with boiling water. The meal must be moistened but not wet. Add to this butter and salt, eggs well beaten and the sour milk. Beat until smooth. Dissolve soda in a tablespoon of the boiling water and stir into the mixture. Turn into a greased pan and bake in a moderate oven forty-five minutes.
A plain Southern-style corn bread with no wheat flour and no sugar, leavened only by soda working against sour milk. Two steps decide whether it succeeds: how much water goes into the scalded meal, and whether your milk is actually acidic.
- Scalding is the hingeAdd boiling water to the cornmeal a few tablespoons at a time, stirring, until the meal is uniformly damp and clumps when squeezed but no liquid pools. Roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups does it for 4 cups of meal, though it varies with the grind. Too much water here and the batter will never firm up, since there is no flour to absorb it.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and tangy. Use 2 cups of well-shaken buttermilk. Pasteurized milk left out does not sour the same way and should not be substituted; if you have only sweet milk, stir 2 tablespoons of lemon juice or white vinegar into it and let it stand 10 minutes.
- Moderate oven350F. Forty-five minutes suits a deep pan; in a shallow one it will be done in 30 to 35, when the top is set and lightly browned and a skewer comes out clean.
- PanThe recipe says only 'a greased pan'; a square or oblong tin about 9 by 13 inches, or a large iron skillet, suits the quantity. This is a big batch and serves 10 to 12. Heating a greased cast-iron pan in the oven before the batter goes in gives the crisp bottom crust this style of bread is made for.
- White mealWhite cornmeal is milder and less sweet than yellow, and is what Southern corn bread traditionally uses. Either works here, but stone-ground meal will drink more of the scalding water than fine degerminated supermarket meal.
- Soda1 teaspoon of baking soda against 2 cups of buttermilk is a reasonable ratio. Dissolving it in a spoonful of hot water is a real technique, not a quaint one: it disperses the soda evenly so you do not get bitter yellow-green streaks. Get the batter into the hot pan promptly once it goes in.
- No sugar, no flourThat is deliberate. This is bread meant to be eaten with butter alongside a meal, and the texture is coarse and crumbly rather than cake-like. Adding sugar or wheat flour makes a different dish.
Corn bread built on scalded meal, soured milk and soda represents the older American way with maize, worked out long before baking powder and before wheat flour became cheap enough to dilute it. Scalding gelatinizes some of the starch so the meal holds together without gluten, a trick that also underlies mush, spoon bread and hoecake. The preference for white meal over yellow is a regional signature, generally associated with the South, where yellow corn was often said to be fit only for fodder.