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Rich Corn Cake
1 cup corn meal 1 cup white flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 1/4 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 7/8 cup milk 2 eggs 1/4 cup melted butter Mix and sift dry ingredients. Add milk, gradually, eggs well beaten, and butter. Bake in a buttered, shallow pan, in a hot oven.
A Northern-style sweet cornbread with an equal split of meal and flour, enriched with eggs and butter. The method is straightforward; what needs translating is the oven and the pan.
- "A hot oven"Read this as somewhere in the 400-425F range; it needs quick heat to set the crust before the crumb dries out. Twenty to twenty-five minutes is usually enough.
- 7/8 cup milkThat is 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons. A modern cup marked in thirds and quarters will get you close enough.
- The pan"Shallow" means the batter should sit no more than an inch deep, so an 8-inch square or a 9-inch round. A deeper pan gives a gummy centre by the time the edges are done. Butter it well and have it warm when the batter goes in.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons for two cups of dry ingredients is generous by current standards; the powders of the period were single-acting and recipes of the era routinely called for more. Three teaspoons of modern double-acting powder should still give ample lift, with less risk of a faintly metallic aftertaste.
- Cornmeal grindUse fine or medium stone-ground meal, yellow or white. Coarse polenta grind will not soften in twenty minutes and leaves the crumb gritty.
- MixingStir only until the dry streaks disappear. This is a batter, not a dough, and beating it smooth develops the wheat flour and toughens the result.
- Yield and servingNine generous squares. Best within an hour of baking, split and buttered while warm; cornmeal breads tend to stale quickly.
Corn cake, corn bread, johnnycake and hoe cake all descend from the same colonial necessity of making bread from maize, which has no gluten and will not rise on its own. The word "rich" in the title appears to be doing real work: it distinguishes this version, with its eggs, sugar and quarter-cup of melted butter, from the plainer everyday corn bread of meal, water or buttermilk, and salt. By the time domestic-science writers were compiling books like this one, the half-flour, half-meal formula raised with chemical baking powder was common in Northern recipe collections, sweeter and cakier than the Southern skillet breads that stayed closer to all-meal and no sugar. The split remains recognisable in American kitchens today, and the argument over whether cornbread should be sweet is still going.