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Spoon Bread (southern dish)
One pint of coarse white corn meal, one dessertspoon of salt, lard size of a walnut, one egg, whites and yolks beaten separately, and milk enough to make a very soft batter-so soft that it will be smooth when still-but not soft enough to separate if left standing. Buttermilk is better than sweet milk, in which case use one-half teaspoon of soda, depending on the acidity of the milk. If you use sweet milk, use two teaspoons of baking powder. Sift meal, put in salt and lard and moisten with hot water, not boiling, as that would spoil it. Warm water will swell the meal and prevent that dryness corn bread often has. Add milk and egg, and last of all the baking powder.
If soda and buttermilk are used beat the soda into the buttermilk thoroughly, before adding to the meal. Last, but not least, put in a granite baking dish, well greased, and very hot, and bake at once in a hot oven.
A plain, batter-bread version of spoon bread — leavened with soda or baking powder rather than built on a cooked mush, and closer to a very soft cornbread than to the custardy soufflé style. Two things carry it: a batter loose enough to level itself, and a baking dish already blistering hot when the batter goes in.
- The hinge: hot dish, hot oven, no waitingGrease the dish and heat it in the oven until it is genuinely hot, then pour and bake immediately. The chemical leavening starts working the moment liquid meets soda or baking powder, and the hot pan sets the outside into a crust while the middle stays spoonable.
- UnitsA pint of cornmeal is 2 cups, roughly 10 oz by weight. A dessertspoon is 2 teaspoons. Lard "size of a walnut" is about 1 tablespoon; butter or bacon fat works in its place.
- Milk quantityNot given, and it genuinely depends on the meal. Note that the meal is first moistened with hot water, so the milk is added on top of that liquid; add it gradually until the batter levels itself in the bowl but does not weep liquid when it stands.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in this period is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F. Reckon on roughly 30-40 minutes, until puffed and browned and the center is just set; it should still be soft enough to serve with a spoon.
- Warm water, not boilingThe instruction is deliberate and worth following as written. Warm water hydrates the meal without gelatinizing the starch; boiling water would turn it to mush and change the texture entirely, which is what the author means by "spoil it."
- Soda versus baking powderWith buttermilk use 1/2 teaspoon soda, dissolved in the buttermilk first as directed. With sweet (unsoured) milk use 2 teaspoons baking powder. Modern buttermilk is cultured and reliably acidic, so the "depending on the acidity" hedge matters less than it did.
- The separated eggBeat the whites separately and add the egg with the milk, before the leavening, as the recipe directs. One egg in 2 cups of meal gives a modest rise, not a souffle.
- CornmealCoarse white meal is what this recipe specifies. A fine or degerminated meal will behave differently and give a smoother, slighter bread; adjust the liquid to reach the same very soft batter.
- The baking dish"Granite" means graniteware — enameled sheet steel, common in period kitchens. A cast-iron skillet or a heavy ceramic baking dish serves the same purpose. Roughly 6 servings, spooned hot from the dish.
Spoon bread belongs to the older American tradition of soft corn breads eaten from the dish with a spoon rather than cut in squares, and its ancestry is generally traced to the cornmeal mushes and pones of the colonial Southeast. The name is descriptive rather than regional: the bread never firms enough to slice. By the turn of the twentieth century chemical leavening had spread into corn bread widely, and this version relies on soda and buttermilk rather than on scalded meal and beaten whites alone. The careful note that hot water must not be boiling suggests the older mush technique still shaped expectations, and the recipe states outright that buttermilk is preferred to sweet milk.