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Golden Corn Cake
1 cup corn meal 1 cup flour 1/4 cup sugar 5 teaspoons baking powder 3/4 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk 1 egg 2 tablespoons melted butter Mix and sift dry ingredients; add milk, egg well beaten, and butter; bake in shallowed buttered pan in hot oven twenty minutes.
Corn Cake (sweetened with Molasses) 1 cup corn meal 3/4 cup flour 3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup molasses 3/4 cup milk 1 egg 1 tablespoon melted butter Mix and bake as Golden Corn Cake, adding molasses to milk.
A plain baking-powder cornbread of the type that filled the bread chapter of American cookbooks a century ago. Two details need attention before you bake: the oven heat and the very large quantity of leavening.
- Hot oven"hot" in period cookbooks corresponds to somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat a shallow pan of batter is done in the twenty minutes given; a cooler oven will leave the centre wet and the crust pale.
- The baking powderFive teaspoons to two cups of dry ingredients is far more than modern practice. Period powders were commonly single-acting, and some cream-of-tartar types lost strength on the shelf, which may account for the generous measure. With today's double-acting powder, 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons gives the same rise without the soapy, metallic aftertaste.
- Pan size"Shallowed" is a slip for shallow. An 8-inch square pan or a 9-inch round cake tin, buttered, gives a thin layer, well under an inch deep. A deeper pan needs longer and loses the crisp top.
- Corn mealUse plain yellow cornmeal, not self-rising cornmeal mix and not corn flour. Stone-ground meal absorbs more liquid; if the batter is stiff enough to mound rather than pour, add milk a tablespoon at a time.
- MixingSift the dry ingredients together, then add the wet all at once and stir only until combined. Cornmeal batters toughen with beating, and the leavening starts working the moment it is wet.
- The molasses versionThe molasses replaces the sugar and 1/4 cup of the milk, and the flour drops to 3/4 cup, so the batter is thinner and browns faster. Watch it from about fifteen minutes; molasses scorches at the edges before the middle sets.
- Yield and servingCuts into about nine squares.
Cornbread leavened with baking powder rather than eggs and long beating belongs to the period when commercial powders had become cheap and widely available to household cooks. Calling it a "cake" is not a claim about sweetness; "corn cake" was commonly used for a quick bread baked flat in a pan.