Corn Bread
Two cups of sour milk One cup of sweet milk Two cups of corn meal One cup of flour One teaspoon of Larkin Soda One teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt Steam two hours. Bake one-half hour.
A steamed-then-baked corn bread of the Boston brown bread family: no sugar, no fat, no eggs, and all its lift from soda meeting sour milk. The batter is thin, and the two-hour steam is what sets it.
- Larkin Soda and Larkin Table SaltHouse-brand goods from the Larkin Company's mail-order catalogue. Use ordinary baking soda and fine table salt, one teaspoon of each.
- Sour milkNot spoiled fresh milk but naturally clabbered raw milk. Cultured buttermilk is the correct stand-in; the acid is what the soda needs to work against.
- You need a mold, not a panSteaming means a greased, lidded pudding mold or a coffee can covered tightly with foil, set on a rack in a deep pot with boiling water reaching halfway up the sides. Keep the water topped up over the two hours.
- Bake one-half hourThe bake follows the steam, out of the mold or with the lid off, to dry the surface and firm the crust. The original gives no temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading.
- Corn mealStone-ground medium or coarse meal gives the texture this recipe expects. Degerminated supermarket meal absorbs less liquid and produces a softer, blander loaf.
- Batter consistencyThree cups of liquid to three cups of dry gives a pourable batter, closer to pancake batter than to a dough. That is correct for steaming; it will firm up considerably.
- Work quicklySoda and sour milk begin reacting the moment they meet. Mix, fill the mold, and get it over the water without delay.
- YieldRoughly one loaf of about two pounds. Slice it thin and eat it warm with butter; being moist, it should keep better than oven corn bread.
Steamed breads belong to the New England line that includes Boston brown bread, where a covered mold set in a kettle let a cook bake without an oven, or without heating one in summer. Sour-milk-and-soda leavening was standard household practice from the nineteenth century onward, when clabbered milk was a daily by-product of the household and saleratus, later refined into baking soda, was the cheap chemical that turned it into lift. The branded ingredients place the recipe in the world of the Larkin Company of Buffalo, a soap and grocery firm that built an enormous mail-order business by giving away premiums and printing recipe booklets in which its own soda, salt and extracts were named as ingredients.